When we are in school the history teacher always tells us that our heritage is important. We ought to know where we came from and how we got here. We are all taught that George Washington was a great man, Abraham Lincoln kept the Union together, and that the United States was the first country to put a man on the moon. These, and thousands of other facts and figures, reside in the history books for everyone to read and to understand. This is a good thing because it gives us roots from which to grow and to make the country, and the world, a better place. (Well, that’s the plan, anyway.) With a firm foundation we ought to be able to expand our intelligence, our experience, and our work ethic. Knowing from whence we came paves the way to our future exploits. (Okay, so it doesn’t really look like we have been successful with this, either.) What they don’t teach us in school is that our personal heritage is also important. It is nice to know that we are Italian, or French, or Irish, but that doesn’t really go far enough to describe our ancestors.

Making a family tree is a useful exercise. It tells us who our grandparents were, and how they built their family. If we are lucky, then we can seek out many generations in the past to learn if we had any people in our family who fought in the Revolutionary War, or who came over on the Mayflower. But there is more to heritage study than finding out if George Washington slept in your great grandfather’s house. We usually don’t think that any living relative of ours is very important. It seems to be the case that each generation tends to reject the previous one as having anything valuable to teach us. We are certainly wrong in this regard. We tend to think that anything written in a magazine, or in a history book, is an indisputable fact. This, too, is erroneous. There are many things in textbooks that are just plain wrong, not outdated, just wrong. How can anyone argue with a textbook? Even worse, we tend to use printed materials to win arguments with our elders. "If the book says so, then it must be so".

We could certainly learn a great deal from the American Indians and other tribal cultures that have always used story telling around the campfire to teach history. When we listen to an elder tell the story of his or her experiences we learn, first hand, how it really was "back in the day". For example, to hear a Holocaust survivor speak about the atrocities of the Nazi’s, and to look upon the tattoos from the concentration camps, gives us the best information as to how it was back then. You will hear real emotions and accurate stories of the person’s trials. You can never get that kind of accuracy from a history book. However, once we start to depend upon books or we listen to ignorant people who are misinformed, the stories become distorted to the point of utter confusion. We lose all contact with the facts.

To preserve our individual heritage we need to seek out our family members who are still living and to listen to their stories about the events in their lives. Do we have grandparents who lived through the great depression? Are there relatives who fought in any of the wars this country has waged? Were any of our relatives at Pearl Harbor in 1941? Closer in time are the deeds of our parents. Maybe one of our people was in New York on September eleventh and witnessed the destruction of the Twin Towers. How much better to hear the story from someone who was there, instead of reading a washed out account by some newspaper reporter in another town. And what about your own experiences? They should be written down so that you will remember more clearly the events that have shaped your life. You will be able to pass on your information to your children and grandchildren so that they will be able to appreciate how their relative (you) experienced the important events in your life. "They" say that there is a book inside everyone. Even if you can’t write well, everyone should write down the events that shaped their lives so that the following generations can learn who they are. Or, make it a practice to sit down with your family once a week (or month) to tell the stories of your life. It is great fun to do this and it brings people together who have been driven apart by this cold and apathetic society. The very best way to preserve one’s heritage is to tape record, or videotape, our elders telling the stories of their lives. In a video we can hear, see, and feel the emotions of the story. As time goes on, and the person is no longer with us, we still have the recordings to teach future generations how it really was, back then.