Lily Found Grandma's Recipe Card and Wouldn't Stop Asking

Lily pulled the green recipe tin off the shelf yesterday after school and came up with a card she wasn't looking for. Faded pencil, a grease spot in one corner, my grandmother's slanted capitals. She held it up to the window over the sink and said, "Why does it say slow oven, and how slow is slow?" And then, before I'd answered, "Is this really her writing or did somebody print it?"

What goes wrong with family history on a screen

I sat Caleb down with the family tree on FamilySearch a couple of years ago, when he was nine. Pretty colors, little leaves that tell you somebody has a record waiting. He found a great-great-grandfather who shares his middle name, said "cool," and was back outside with a baseball inside four minutes. I'd handed him a name and two dates and a town, and he did what a sane nine-year-old does with that, which is file it.

What children want is a person. A pair of hands, a thing she said that got repeated at every reunion, a smell in a kitchen. Give them one of those first and they'll ask for the names themselves.

The research I read this month says something close to that in more careful words. Kids who know their family's stories, even small ones like how their parents met, tend to do better on confidence and anxiety. It's easy to overstate, so I'd hold it loosely. I didn't need a study to tell me what happened with Caleb and the leaf.

Start with one object and let it raise the questions

You don't need a box of heirlooms. You need one thing somebody made or wrote or wore, and a child who gets to hold it.

Ours is an applesauce spice cake card that says 2 1/2 c. flour. I scooped and leveled that, which my grandmother never did in her life, and it weighed 312 grams. The sauce line says "crab if you have it," and at the bottom it says "bake till it smells done," which Lily read out loud twice and then sniffed the card.

Photograph the front and the back before anyone gets flour on it. Then write down the questions the object raises all on its own, the ones you didn't have to think of. Ours were what leaves a grease spot like that, who on earth would write "double for Relief Society," and why a person trusts an oven that has no number on it. I knew the answer to the last one and I'll get to it. Put the questions on an index card of your own and carry the list to whoever might know the rest.

Then make the thing. We made the cake Thursday night and it came out too dark on top and a little dry in the middle, probably because my oven has no setting called slow.

The day my grandmother wouldn't tell me how much

The summer I was ten I stood on a step stool in her kitchen in St. George, holding a pencil I'd borrowed, because I wanted to write down her spice cake so I could make it at home, and she told me everything except amounts. A little of this, enough of that. When I pushed, she looked at me over her glasses and said I'd know when the batter looked right. Her oven had a dial with a worn-off second line and that line was slow. That's all slow ever meant to her, and she never saw a reason to say more.

I wrote it all down anyway, in the round blue-ink handwriting I'd practiced all year, with my own guesses for the numbers. She read it and picked up her pencil. She crossed out my "1 c. sugar" and wrote "less" above it, and then she took a fresh card and wrote out the real recipe herself while I watched, which took about as long as it takes to say.

I'd forgotten all of that until Lily turned the card over yesterday. There on the back, clipped behind with a bent paper clip, was my ten-year-old copy with her "less" still on it. Lily looked at the round letters and then at me. "That's you."

She wanted to know if I'd gotten in trouble about the sugar. I told her no, and that I think my grandmother meant "less" as a kind of gift. Then I had to tell her about the step stool and the dial and what she was like when she was being stingy with numbers on purpose, and Lily asked for the part about the glasses twice. We were at the sink for the better part of an hour and the dishes didn't get done.

How do you get kids interested in old photographs?

One picture at a time with one question each, and never fifty with a quiz at the end. Pick five that have somebody doing something. A woman holding a hose. A boy on a tractor he's too small for. On the back of each, in pencil because ink bleeds, write who and when and where, plus one thing you know about the person that you can't see. Caleb reads the backs of pictures before the fronts, so he got the job of adding a line to each.

Then show them to the oldest person who might recognize anyone. For us that's my mother, who can name every aunt in a 1961 photograph by the shape of her shoes. We do it on Sunday calls now, Diane on speaker and a picture held up to the phone camera.

The child who wanted to know what a temple dedication is for has started asking Diane things I never thought to. And Caleb, who once asked me whether Job's children did something wrong, asks about people long dead. Mostly whether they were scared. I answer those the way my grandmother answered about the sugar, by saying what I know and where it stops.

Where the names and the temple fit

None of this makes the names unimportant. Emma does temple work for people whose names she found, and she keeps going back to the same few records because she's gotten attached to the people in them.

Malachi has a line about hearts that I've turned over for a while.

And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.

Malachi 4:6

Deuteronomy 6 has a child asking what all the commandments mean. The father doesn't explain a single one. He tells the child what happened to the family.

Then thou shalt say unto thy son, We were Pharaoh's bondmen in Egypt; and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand

Deuteronomy 6:21

He says "we," and he says it to a child who wasn't there.

Frequently Asked Questions

My kids think family trees are boring. Now what?

Close the laptop and find an object, a card or a photograph or a quilt or a pocketknife, and ask what it can tell you and what it leaves out. Go back to the tree once there's a face attached to one of the leaves.

How old do kids need to be?

Younger than you'd think if all you ask them to do is listen. Ben is two and says "Lily" at every baby picture no matter whose it is, and I'm counting that. Around eight or nine they can interview a relative while you hold the phone.

Where do I find activities for kids online?

FamilySearch.org has an Activities link near the top once you're signed in, with projects like Record My Story and Picture My Heritage, and some of them are picture-based for children as young as three. I'd use it for ideas and not as the whole plan.

What if nobody can answer the question?

Leave it on the index card. Ours is the Relief Society line. Diane has a guess about which luncheon it was and says it's only a guess, and my grandmother is gone, so it stays a guess with Diane's name beside it. Lily copied it out in her own handwriting.

What do I actually ask the oldest relative?

Ask about one dish. Who made it, who ate it, what was always wrong with it. People who can't tell you a date will tell you that.

Write it down in their words and not yours, and put their name and the day next to it, because a story with nobody's name on it turns into family legend inside a generation.

with love, Melissa