My father sadly has no idea how much he has influenced my career.
All blogs need to have that first starter post and procrastination is the worst enemy of its creator. As Jennifer Saunders so rightly put it: “I wish someone really important would admit to procrastination and turn it into a disease and then there would be a treatment centre”. But start somewhere I must, so I am going to leap in with the motivations behind my drive to start Record My Past.
The best way to begin is with two photos.
With permission of BridgeClimb Sydney
Same man – my father (the one that’s clearly not my father is me).
Can you spot the difference, besides advancing years? You won’t, because it’s not visible – or not audible in this particular case.
When the first photo was taken, my father was a vibrant and talkative fellow who loved to argue a point (mainly with me), tell a bad joke (mainly to me), perform in the local dramatic productions and talk me through the recipes he ‘made up’ – he wasn’t a quiet man put it that way.
The second photo is of a vastly different person – as the result of a stroke in the left side of his brain, about a year and a half after the first photo was taken, Dad was left with a vastly reduced ability to speak, read and write, known as aphasia. Cognitively he was unaffected, so had the added frustration of knowing exactly what he wanted to say but being unable to channel it into intelligible language.
“Aphasia doesn’t affect intelligence. Stroke survivors remain mentally alert, even though their speech may be jumbled, fragmented or hard to understand.” American Stroke Association
Whilst this is hardly an uplifting anecdote, there is a point to it.
At the time Dad had his stroke I was too busy on the journey of having my own children to feel anything but sadness and frustration, on his behalf, at the isolation that was the legacy of his aphasia. It was only when I started to emerge from the all-consuming motherhood fog that my interest in genealogy was sparked by finding Dad’s scraps of ‘pre-stroke’ family history research. Realising its importance to him, I went on a mission to research and fully document the Hutchison family tree, which I presented to him in a thick folder for Christmas one year. He was delighted and extremely grateful.
But there was something missing. His own story – memories of parents, grandparents, schooling, rugby, being a father, family anecdotes, his experience droving cattle from the top to the bottom of Australia and learning the practical skills to build our ‘still going strong’ family kitchen 40 years ago. So many unanswered questions that are not lost – just completely trapped in a brain that can no longer communicate them.
The message, and my reason for starting a business that captures personal life stories and family histories, is (I hope) obvious.