Motivation

What are your motivations to research family? I recently watched an episode of brainchild on Netflix about how to hack your motivation. And today I attended a webinar hosted by Massachusetts Society of Genealogists (MSOG) where Diana Elder spoke of her method to Research Like a Pro. As the two programs swirled in my head, mixed up in the blender of my brain, I wondered – what is my motivation to research the people I do? And now I’m asking you also – What is your motivation?

I sit at my antique secretary desk*, currently jury-rigged to accommodate technology that wasn’t even imagined when this desk was built, and I think – What motivates me to find information about people? Is it because I’m nosy? I joke that I’m the old Italian lady that sits at the window watching the neighborhood antics behind the sheer curtains. I think this is part of my motivation – a need to know. To know where I fit in the the world. As I delve deeper down this thought path, I think my motivation comes from an innate curiosity and a need to learn, but mostly from the deep feeling that everyone belongs to someone and not knowing who and where you belong (or came from) is a very empty feeling. Everyone should be remembered by someone, relative or not, since the world today is the way it is due to the miniscule contributions and daily decisions each individual person that came before.

*inherited from a woman named Sophie Brady, who lived behind me when I was very young, and was a third grandmother to me. I loved her so much! She introduced me to the glories of Barber Chicken stuffed with salty savory chicken stuffing, cooked in the toaster oven for lunch.

But think – we each are a tenuous link to the past. I am a link to my parents, their parents and their grandparents. When my parents are gone, I am THE ONLY link left between my descendants and my parents. Who else but me will be able to tell stories of my parents to my descendants? I’m motivated to get my facts together, in a coherent form, in order for my descendants to allow my ancestors to live on in these facts and stories.

I am a helper. I’ve known this my whole life. I’m not a do-er, I help. And helping people is a need for me (well, this & feeding people as my neighbors will tell you).

My motivation to start my research business and help others is driven by all these above, but more so by the satisfaction received seeing in others the excitement, sometimes shock, amazement and just sheer joy of finding out from where their relatives come and what experiences were lived.

I now share with you excerpts from a poem known well to genealogists:

Excerpts from THE STORY TELLERS
Originally written by Della M. Cummings Wright, date unknown;
with numerous edits by various people since the original

We are the chosen.
In each family there is one who seems called to find the ancestors – to put flesh on their bones and make them live again
Those who have gone before cry out to us: tell our story. 
So we do. 
In finding them, we somehow find ourselves. 

It goes to a deep and immense understanding that they were doing it for us. 
That we might be born who we are.
That we might remember them.
So we do. 
With love and caring and scribing each fact of their existence, because we are them and they are us.

So, as a scribe is called, I tell the story of my family and take [my] place in the long line of family storytellers

So. I ask YOU.
What is your motivation?
Why do you collect facts, branches, leaves, roots?
Why do you research?
Comment below.