My Notebook

THOUGHTS OR QUOTES

I have found that connections can be our best friends, especially when learning about ourselves and our personal histories. These connections shape our writing about history. In today’s world, knowing how the history and perspectives of other people and cultures are similar and different from our own past helps us become writers who think like historians. A historian is someone who studies or writes about history.


From my reading of The Story in History: Writing Your Way into the American Experience by M.F. Galt.

The author’s words sparked my imagining aspects of the lives of my members of my family tree. I smelled the plowed ground of the farm and saw in my head a faded photograph of my descendant in 1630 who later became one of five men starting New Amsterdam. Today it is New York City. My great grandmother was a painter, and I have one of her oil paintings in my home. The chart of my family members of years past brings memories which suggest traits I might have inherited from them in my own life. Hmmm.

What do you think?