Documenting one's family history, the truths, the jokes, the family's members, the sadness, the joys...

It seems we fill even the precious moments of family time with formality and in most cases purposeless distractions. Before we forget to ask, make it a point to gather as much knowledge of your family's history..

And so, while my children recently lost their Great Great Grandmother; their three remaining Great Grandparents and four grandparents now hold priviledge the task of handing down the family history.

My father (Da to my children) recently wrote this in his blog. (read it here or follow the link to his site)

Burying Welsh History - Steve Weeks
http://bloggerhythms.blog.com/Journal/

When I was a boy we visited relations in the Welsh Valleys. We visited in Merthyr Tydfil where my nan grew up, and in Pentrebach where my mother was born. It was my introduction to other worlds. There I realised that everybody didn't live as we did; and though it didn't break on my imagination that some places might be quite preferable to mine, it was now obvious that some of them were dreadful. There wasn't actually deprivation; nor was it dangerously criminal. Education and employment were tolerable, but there in the corner was an old man with wheezing chest and little energy, exhausted and poisoned by the work underground in the mines. The young people were - even by my poor standards - lacking energy or confidence and seemed to mope around without hope or expectation. Worst of all was driving through Aberfan after the school disaster. The rain had mobilised one of the great slag heaps to slide and bury an entire school filled with all the children of the town. Now the streets were empty, and you felt that your sad thoughts were those of everyone even as you looked out of a car window driving through.

The pits are hidden now. grassed over with a playground slide glinting in its deceitful primary colours to catch the sun where once the pit head stood as a grey gateway to pitch black depths. The youth work on Nissan cars and web designs. Will the unspoken become the unremembered? My own grandfather worked the pithead. He lowered and raised his colleagues from the earth, and told stories of legends and days gone. My nan told me that Churchill had sent troops to Tonypandy in 1910 to open fire on striking miners. Would that one day be forgotten? They were sent before she was born, but still a window with a conservative party sticker would need new glass within an hour.

That same rain falls sometimes hard enough in the right place and cuts a black scar in the slag heaps. The light covering of grass on steep slopes where no-one goes is a thin skin. And it cuts a scar that is as bible black and honest. The bleeding is honest and clear as a mountain stream can be. But the wound reminds us that there are grandfathers missing from the graveyards of South Wales. They went under the pit head at dawn and never returned from the blackness below.

Steve Weeks (Great Grandson, Grandson, Son, Husband, Parent and Grandparent)
http://bloggerhythms.blog.com/Journal/