‘Legacy’ is a wonderful book by Linda Spence published in 1997. In it she writes about the importance of developing a personal history and how to do it.
Legacy is about life, your life, and it is a gift to others.
– Linda Spence
As Linda says, Legacy is about life, your life, and it is a gift to others.
But how do you start? How do you fill in those blank electronic pages?
One way is purely chronological, starting with your earliest or latest memories and working forward or backward as appropriate. You might do that by year, decade, or stage of life (childhood, adolescence, etc.)
But you can be creative and organize by pursuits such as education, sports, hobbies, locations you have lived, work streams, etc.
The great thing about using Kinscape for your legacy is that you can set up various Stories and if you like Communities. For example, you might set up a Community where your Stories are calendarized, another that covers a particular sport like tennis, another on stamp collecting and another on your family history with Ancestry and 23andMe data.
What I found useful is just starting. Set up ‘My Family History’ Community; set a few stories with Titles, grab some photos and videos and start dropping them in and adding commentary and amazingly quickly you have a bunch of stuff. Then it is important to stop and think how you want to organize the content.
Our brains do not work sequentially. For example, you will be thinking about a particular year, but a photo will start you thinking about your education or a person you loved and your memories will move down another path. Capture them. You can always go back to the starting point.
Then ask yourself questions. In Linda’s book she identifies hundreds of questions you can use to start a train of thought and documentation.
A critical question is the extent to which you would like others to collaborate with you. There will be other players in your rugby team that would like to share information about you but also add their own reflections on the team. Using Kinscape you can keep some areas totally private and have others that are a team effort. You can have collaborative authorship or sole author Stories or both.
A good example is a Family story. Everybody belongs to two families: their Father’s and their Mother’s. Their interests are like a Venn diagram; some are common to both while others are of more interest or relevancy to the father’s or mother’s family. So, two Communities with different Members. Some Stories shared with both and some for one or the other.
In this way your legacy can become tuned to different audiences if you so wish. That is difficult to do in hard copy but easy in Kinscape.
Peter Cunningham
Founder Kinscape