Bookends vs. the Middle: Dates Aren't the Story
okay so. we've been dancing around this idea for a few lessons now and i want to just say it straight out.
birth and death dates are bookends. they hold the shelf up. they are not the books.
i see people put so much energy into nailing down exact dates. what year did great-grandpa actually get to utah. was it 1911 or 1912. did he come through the point of the mountain area first or settle up near the canyon before moving down. and look, i get the pull, i've lost whole evenings to this exact kind of chase. but here's the thing. nobody ever cried reading a date. nobody's ever texted their cousin a birth year and had the cousin tear up.
the middle is where the person actually is.
what goes in the middle
the middle is the boring stuff. i mean that as a compliment, it's basically my whole teaching philosophy at this point. what someone ate for breakfast. how they took their coffee, if they drank coffee, or what they had instead if they didn't. what truck they drove and whether it started on the first try in january. whether they hummed while they worked. whether they were the kind of cold that meant a sweater in july.
that stuff is the actual person. the dates are just where you set the bookends so the person doesn't slide off the shelf.
a practical way to do this at home
here's a simple exercise. take whatever memory or fact you're working with right now, even if it's just a name and two dates off a record. and instead of trying to fill in more dates, ask yourself three questions:
- what did this person do with their hands.
- what did a regular tuesday look like for them.
- what's one small, specific, almost embarrassing detail someone told you about them. the kind of detail that feels too small to write down.
write down whatever comes, even one sentence. don't worry about whether it's "enough." it's never going to feel like enough at first. that's normal.
if you genuinely don't have any of that yet, that's fine too, no worries at all. that just tells you what to go ask someone at pancakes this week. which, by the way, is basically how i get most of my material. people don't hand this stuff over on request. you have to catch them mid-something-else.
the christmas magnets
one year i took a bunch of the old shoebox photos and 3d printed little photo-frame magnets for everybody in the household, each one with a scanned picture in it. nothing fancy. i just wanted something small people could actually hold and stick on the fridge instead of a photo buried in a folder somewhere.
justin put his on the fridge. it's still there, years later. i didn't say anything about it, i just noticed it every time i grabbed the milk.
and that's the thing i keep coming back to. it wasn't the date on the photo that made it stick to that fridge. nobody looked at it and thought "ah yes, 1962." it stuck because it was a person's actual face, doing an actual thing, in a moment somebody could recognize. the date was just information printed on the back. the photo was the story.
that's what i want your writing to do. i want the reader to feel like they're standing in the kitchen with your ancestor, not reading a caption under a photo.
an opinion, since we're here
i'll say the contrarian thing again because i believe it: you don't need every date confirmed to write something true. if you're not sure whether it was 1911 or 1912, write "the way we tell it is he arrived sometime around 1911" and keep going. don't let the missing date stop the sentence. the dates can stay a little fuzzy. the middle can't stay empty.
one caution, small but real
if you're pulling family stories from older relatives, be careful about pushing too hard on dates and facts they're shaky on. some people get genuinely anxious when they feel tested on their own memory, especially with age or memory changes. ask about the truck, the breakfast, the sweater. let the dates stay loose. you'll get more, and you won't make anyone feel bad in the process.
before next time
pick one detail this week, no bigger than "how they took their coffee" or "what was always in their pocket," and write it into a sentence or two. don't touch a single date while you do it.