The Importance of Being Personally Historical...or Something.

It's family history day--uh, for me, that is. :D As all my followers know, I love history, and there's a special place in my heart for the middle ages. No, I do not bask in the disease-ridden unwashedness (totally a word!) of the medieval era, but I do like the darker, broodier, more twisted aspects of this time period. It makes for awesome fiction! 

That said, more recent history--that is, our own--is also important and fun to learn about. It can be funny, tragic, and even dark and twisty on occasion. (Sometime I'll have to post about the two different sets of murders that occurred on my mother's side of the family several generations back! Muah-hah-hah...)

Anyway, I got a little piece of family history last week and thought I'd share it. My dad, my sister and myself all went down to Provo together (about an hour south of us) to drop my nineteen-year-old brother Abram off at the LDS MTC. (For all you clueless non-Utahns out there, LDS is an abbreviation for our religion and the MTC is the Missionary Training Center. My bro is going to serve a Christian mission for the next two years. Go Abe! :D)

Anyway (am I saying that a lot?) after we dropped him off I noticed my dad, who was driving, wasn't headed for the interstate. I asked where he was going and he answered, "I want to show you something."  He took us to this house.

He said he and my mom lived there for a while not long after I was born. (I was born in Orem, a suburb of Provo, so this made perfect sense. Isn't it great when the world makes sense?) I had him pull around so I could snap a picture with my smart phone. (All the while praying the current residents weren't calling 9-1-1 to report creepy Mormon stalkers taking pictures from a silver Ford Focus.)

Why is this important? It's really not to anyone but me. I just thought it was cool to have a picture of a house I might have learned to walk or crawl in, or maybe just trashed all around, being the annoying teeny-bopper that I, no doubt, was.

Personal history is important. My slogan says, Knowledge of our past is our inheritance. What we do with that knowledge will shape our destinies. While this is true of all history, it is perhaps most important with our own personal histories, because they most directly shape who we are and who we will become, even if we don't fully realize it. 

Is your personal history important to me? Unless there's some specific relevance, probably not, but it's personal and important to you. We should always be trying to learn new things about ourselves. What better way than in the form of our own, unique histories? No one else lived in this house as a toddler with my parents and older sister, did they? So this truly, uniquely mine. (So cool!)

What was the last cool thing you found out about your personal or family history?

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