In the early 1990s, we saw the beginnings of the widely available internet. Dial up only, super slow, very expensive.
At one point I read an article in, I recall, Time Magazine, about the explosion of use of the internet by people, often older generations, seeking to research their genealogy using the new resources available.
In the article, I read that Scotland was one of the world leaders in making such registers of births, marriages and deaths open to the public via the internet.
The General Registry of Scotland had partnered with a business called Scotland Online, and they’d even already set up online payments along with this public / private joint partnership. World leading indeed!
My family is largely from Scotland, so my natural curiousity had me, sitting in the Cayman Islands, go online and pay and search records and research my father’s side of the family (reasonably easy, as our surname is not that common), and within literally minutes I could track this back to the 1700s!
I then went online to some bulletin boards (some may remember those!) and found a member of the family from the tree about three generations ago. They had also been researching my great-grandfather and had a fascinating story to tell around his funeral.
Now, my grandfather was still alive at this time, so I planned a trip to visit him a few months later in the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. I’d never asked him about the family, but this time we sat down several times and he told me tales from his childhood.
He then died shortly afterwards, quite suddenly.
What if I’d not asked him?
What information may not have been passed down to the next generation?
I am reminded of this as I have decided to write a book to share a leadership model I’ve been developing with the world. As a key part of this project, I’ve embarked on interviewing leaders around the world that I know and respect. They come from many backgrounds, countries, ages, cultures.
What do they all have in common to share ? Stories.
These stories have, in each interview, given me goosebumps, real goosebumps.
Stories are powerful, representing an aural history.
In business, such aural histories can and do present powerful cultural foundation stones that can last way beyond any rules, poicies, procedures.
For some countries, aural histories are deeply rooted in their culture. In the Cayman Islands, for example, in the early 1990s, a project was undertaken to record the aural histories of the elders of the country, to capture them before they passed. You see, that country had changed so, so rapidly in the twenty or so years before that point that it had moved from aural histories passed down through families to conventional modern written histories. The archivists had the wisdom to record the stories of the elders for posterity.
In modern society, we tend to minimise and marginalise our elders. We call them old, not elder. I hope that here I’ve caused you to pause for thought about your own elders, those family members with stories to tell.
If so, I offer you an idea.
Interview them, and please, do what I neglected to do with my grandfather.
Record your interviews, save them. Transcribe them, pass them on.
Stories are precious.