It always surprises me how little most people seem to know about their heritage and members of their families…especially their parents. I say especially their parents because parents are typically the closest people in your life at a young age, you would think after spending so much time with them you would know everything about them including all their stories. No matter how many times I encounter people who don’t know much about their heritage, I’m still surprised by it. It just seems so prevalent. This isn’t always the case but it is much more common than I would expect.
Many families are not sharers. The nature or culture of their family is such that there just isn’t much personal stuff shared among the family. I feel like our modern generation is more open and shares more than previous generations did, but not in a substantial way. Many people perpetuate elements of the family culture they grew up with and so this tendency to be closed off emotionally and personally still continues today. I don’t even think it is a conscious thing most of the time. I think certain people and certain families are just not open people, they keep things in and don’t reveal much personal information, even with their closest family members.
This culture of not sharing is so prevalent that even I, who feels like I come from a family of deep sharing and openness, still don’t know everything about my family members and heritage, including that of my parents. I think this is a human nature thing. Most people are busy in our modern world. There is a lot to do and to occupy our minds and time. This doesn’t leave much time or space to share, to be open, and to let others truly learn your stories. I feel like this was a major reason I don’t know as much about my dad as I wish I did. Don’t get me wrong, I believe I probably knew my dad better and knew his stories and history better than the vast majority of children know their parents. I was blessed to spend a lot of one on one time with my dad. Though he wasn’t a big sharer by his nature, this time we spent together created spaces where he did open up and shared quite a bit. I’m very grateful for all he did share and I will always treasure it.
Looking back I realize I do know my dad’s story in general a great deal, but when it comes to all the little details of that story, there are many gaps I wish I would have had him fill in. My dad was very humble. He never had any interest in making a scene, unless he was yelling at a referee at one of my sporting events. He didn’t want to be the center of attention, and like me, he did not care for those who did. When I think about this I realize how lucky I am to know so much about him. He didn’t share freely, it took just the right situation and questions to get him to talk about himself and his life.
One of the first times I really realized I didn’t know all the details about his life, was when I was 20 years old. I was living on the Puget Sound and my dad told me that one of his best friends from his high school years was living near me. I found his old friend’s address and dropped by his house one day I told him who I was and he invited me in. The first thing he said to me was that I look just like my dad. Saying I am comparable to my dad in any way is the greatest complement someone can give me. I spent about an hour with him asking him about my dad when he was younger. I was surprised by what I heard. There wasn’t any great revelation about my dad that didn’t fit how I knew him to be, it was just for the first time picturing my dad as a teenager as I heard his stories. It wasn’t something I had done before. He talked about some of the mischief they would get into and pranks they pulled. It opened my eyes to a huge part of my dad’s life I really knew very little about. It added to my understanding of his story.
After my dad passed away I started thinking about his life a lot. I started to realize there were many gaps in the details of his life that I just didn’t fully know. I knew the larger stories, but I didn’t know many of the details of those stories. It became very important to me to try to fill in my understanding of those details as much as possible. One major story I knew, but didn’t know all the details to was the story of his high-tech startup days.
Growing up I knew my dad had an entrepreneurial spirit and drive. I knew he had been involved in a technology startup in San Francisco before I was born, in the late 70’s. I realized I didn’t know much about it though. After he passed away I wanted to know more about it so I traveled to Washington to visit his business partner in that venture and asked him to tell me the story. What I learned blew me away. I couldn’t believe my dad never gave me the details that his partner laid out for me. What they did was a big deal. They kind of invented ecommerce in 1977. They created what was essentially a system for people to buy heavy equipment from anywhere in the world using an early internet type system. They had investors, both sets of my grandparents included, and office space at the piers in downtown San Francisco. They had a contract with GE, one of the largest corporations in the world. I couldn’t believe it. This was 14 years before the internet became available to the public. It was way ahead of its time. The way my dad told it, it was just a little thing they did that was cool but didn’t work out…not that big of a deal.
At the time I was the cofounder of a small app development start up and was blown away that my dad had been a startup cofounder himself. Not only that, he was a startup co-founder contemporary to Steve Jobs. They started their company less than a year after Apple Computers was founded and their offices were less than 45 miles from each other. No, their company did not become the most profitable company in history, like Apple did, but still, this was a fascinating and enlightening piece of knowledge to gain. It added greatly to the depth of my dad’s story in my mind. I still think about it often and what that must have been like for him to experience.
SHARE YOUR EXPERIENCES! You might not think there is much to them, but you will be surprised. Your loved ones, and especially your children will love to hear your stories. They will love to know you better and understand you at a deeper level. If you come from a family culture that doesn’t share, break that cycle and show your children the great benefits that come for sharing. Doing so will bring you closer and will provide so many lessons to your posterity as they hear your stories, read between the lines, make connections to their lives, and do even greater things because they know you did too. Sharing your experiences will do more for your legacy than you can imagine.
