Everybody loves baby stories. Whether it is a story about how your brother used to pull you around the neighborhood in a wagon or how you tried to teach the family dog how to read, stories about what you and your siblings and other family members were like as babies and young children are always interesting. If you are interested in genealogy, you may want to incorporate some of your family’s baby stories into your work.
To collect family baby stories for use in a family history book or scrapbook, you will want to start by interviewing people in the family that are parents. The children themselves will not remember the stories. If they do, it is likely that they will remember them differently than the parents that were there to laugh or stare in wonder at what happened. A collection of baby stories that is written into a family history book or combined with pictures and other mementos in a scrapbook is a great way to keep these stories alive for future generations of parents in your family. It is also a fun way for the “babies” that played a starring role in those stories to see themselves as their parents saw them at that time.
My family has a few baby stories. One is, as mentioned above, when someone tried to teach the family dog how to read. That someone was me, and I thought that since reading was so much fun for me then the dog might also want to know how. My mother told me that story and I think it is kind of cute. After all, when you are very small you probably think that animals can do anything. I have a lot of stories that I’ll want to remember so that I can tell my son about them when he is a little bit older. One story that could come in handy a few years from now is that at eighteen months old, one of Dylan’s favorite activities is “washing” dishes with me. He also picks up tiny pieces of dirt off of the floor and brings them to me saying “eeew”. I am sure that at some point he will have a bedroom that is less than clean, and I can tell him these baby stories to remind him that at one time in his life he really liked cleaning. It may not inspire him to clean his room, but it may make him laugh and stories that can make people laugh are always worth preserving.