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The
Museum of Family History
is Your Family History!
What Will Your Legacy
Be?
Preserving the collective memory of our family is incredibly important.
Whether someone is or isn't still living, it is nevertheless important
to preserve their life history and allow those who knew them and loved
them to remember them. A life worth living is a history worth
preserving. By preserving our own family stories, our life experiences, we are performing a mitzvah
by honoring and preserving their memory for the present and future
generations. This is our legacy – how we show the world that we care
enough about our family, our ancestors, by creating a permanent record
of their lives. The Museum of Family
History strives to tell stories of our families, while at the same time
creating a virtual world of World Jewish history that will both educate
and stimulate the imagination and intellectual curiosity of anyone who
spends time visiting the Museum.
The Museum of Family History is
your family history! If you look through the museum's web pages you
will see countless examples of stories and family photographs shared
with the museum by those
who knew of the museum's existence and wanted to contribute to its development. They
not only wanted to honor the memory of their family members, but they
too were hoping that someone who would see a particular photograph, or read
a story and
would somehow know the family. And this has happened a good number of
times! Such devotion to preserving family history inspires others to do
the same ... Remember that this museum is your museum!
Many of us who are Jewish say that for much of the Jewish population in
the United States and in many parts of the world, we are becoming less
in tune with who we are as Jews. We don't often talk about our
ancestors, and they often are forgotten or relegated to the deep
recesses of our mind. Many of us no longer belong to synagogues, many of
which are merging with other synagogues for wont of membership. Often
times we don’t follow our hallowed traditions as we once did, and we
very often are not activists for important Jewish
causes as perhaps past generations of Jews were, such as protesting
against anti-Semitism.
Nowadays many of us no longer live near other members of our extended
family as we may have once done many years ago. We often don’t talk to
our children and grandchildren about our parents or our grandparents and
the like. There is little “oral tradition” between our elders and their
descendants, where we talk fondly about our own ancestors, in the hopes
of passing down the history of our ancestors to the generation of today
and hopefully future generations. Perhaps we should become “activists”
in a sense, working diligently to keep the memory of our ancestors
alive. There needs to be some concrete way to reconnect with our past
generations, e.g. by preserving memory, and by doing so strengthening our lineage and giving more
meaning to our own lives.
I
recently spoke to a woman in her nineties who told me woefully that she
had given her son many of her precious family albums to keep in his
attic for safe keeping. She further told me that he threw them all out,
thinking that they weren’t important enough to save. After hearing her
tale of woe,
it further enforced my opinion that creating an online tribute to our
family was the best way to go, to create a legacy online, to display
one’s most precious photographs on virtual museum walls, including even
audio or video tributes to our loved ones alongside the photographs.
Here at the virtual Museum of Family History we are making a special
commitment to assist others in achieving this goal. Here at the Museum,
you can create your own legacy by allowing us to feature your family as
one of our Legacy online exhibitions. You can commit yourself to doing
this through the telling of your memory of your family members in a
myriad of ways: by writing stories about them, through the display of
photographs on our museum walls, and by the telling orally or visually
about their lives and your memories of them.
Next you will be able to read some nice testimonials to myself, Steven
Lasky, the director and founder of the Museum, the chief driving force behind the Museum.
You will be able to see
a prototype of what an exhibition about your own family may look like.
The options of how such an exhibition may be created are many.
Creating
a legacy as I've described it is a daunting task. However, you are not
alone. The Museum offers to you the option of having us create your own family’s legacy – or of
course, you can take charge and write, organize the exhibition yourself.
We can scan your photographs for you and perhaps put them onto a CD or
make them into a family album.
You can read several testimonials given
for my work. You can also see the description of two
awards I have been given, mostly related to
Jewish genealogy. You can also see an example of
what the Museum can do for you by visiting my own "Ness Family"
exhibition, which I have created in order to honor my maternal
grandparents and their progeny. Please contact the Museum of Family
History for more
information and the fees involved at
steve@museumoffamilyhistory.com.
If you'd like to read every page of the Museum's Legacy Project,
including the testimonial page, the awards page, and my "Ness Family"
exhibition, just click on the right arrows at the bottom of each page.
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