By AGNES PASCO CONATY
Credit: Agnes Pasco Conaty
My family delights in gathering together in the backyard, listening to music and talking by the campfire on clear summer nights. This is how we began our family storytelling. Over time, our collection of family stories has grown to reflect where we came from and who we are. But why record your family story? As English writer Henry Graham Greene said, “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.” My family treasures looking back and imagining forward.
Before visiting my mother in the Philippines, in 2023, I started pulling together my family’s collective personal essays, poems, anecdotes and photos, and assembling them in a binder. That binder held memories of growing up with my maternal grandparents, our family reunions on New Year’s Day, Christmas traditions and essays my son wrote based on his dad’s stories. My son also wrote about his Lola (my mother) during the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines, and he reflected on his experience of the pandemic. Months later, we turned to that binder for material as we wrote a book about our family history, Wicker Baskets: Family Vignettes & Poetry.
I had compelling reasons for writing this history, including my desire to share my own memories of my father with family members who had never met him. My father enlisted in the Philippine Army right after college and served as a military police officer alongside American soldiers in World War II; he was one of Cabanatuan’s Skull Battalion who survived the Bataan Death March. Seven years ago, I had the honor of receiving on his behalf a posthumous Congressional Gold Medal at the United States Capitol.
I also wanted to record my family’s beautiful oral history, and since my mother is in her 90s, time was of the essence. I treasure her recollections of growing up by the railway station in San Fernando, Pampanga, Philippines, where she and her sisters sold food and water to Japanese soldiers. She met my father when he was working as a civil engineer and boarded at her parents’ home. My mother is the oldest surviving member of our family now, which makes her stories even more valuable. I wrote down what she told us during her few visits to my home in Laurel.
And our collection will keep family stories alive for my son, and my nieces and nephews; having a written history allows them to pass our family stories down to their own children and grandchildren. This family memoir preserves the love that binds us together, even across great distances and time.
So what can you write about your family? Think about the small things in life that hold you together in big ways, like those treasured recipes relatives ask for from potlucks and reunions. Or the photos in albums up in an attic that you could dust off and digitize. Your collection might include scenes from right here in Laurel: kids posing with the Easter Bunny at the community center. Families lining Main Street to celebrate the Fourth of July parade, and later that evening, turning their faces up in awe to watch the fireworks at Granville Gude Park. Those great walks you took with your kids and the terrific restaurant tastings with your parents at the Main Street Festival.
So how to pull your own mementoes and memories together? Teamwork and some research can help. Pull in your teens, ask grandpa to tell you that story one more time so you can write it down. Talk with your family about what matters the most to them as you share memories and collect stories. For my family, the stories that reflect our values, dreams and hopes quickly became the most important. And we looked for anecdotes capturing our family’s humor and humanity.
Someday, someone dear to you will come across your own memoir, that treasured collection of family stories and photos and say, “Wish I’d met my grandfather; I would have really liked him.”
