Hi Friends of Legacy,
This story was contributed by Tom Cordle, author and songwriter. I asked him to write a press article related to our January Theme which was "Turning over a new leaf". I wasn't expecting to be included in the article but his angle was creative and I think can provoke interesting discussion. Enjoy!
Tom Cormier, President
YOU CAN PUT TIME IN A BOTTLE!
The arrival of a new year reminds us of the inexorable passage of time. We often wish we could make time stand still – or as Jim Croce put it one of his songs:
“If I could save time in a bottle
, the first thing that I'd like to do,
Is to save every day till eternity passes away
just to spend them with you”
Actually, Croce did save time in a bottle, in a sense, since his song lives on long after his untimely death.
We all have days we’d love to save; but unlike Croce, most of us won’t be able to save them – or say I love you – in a song. We need some other way to pass on our most cherished memories to our children, grandchildren and beyond.
Fortunately, someone figured out a way to do just that. Tom Cormier says his family provided the inspiration.
“I come from a large family – ten kids – so my folks have lots of stories to tell. But they’re getting up in years, and they won’t always be around to tell them. That got me thinking about a way to preserve those stories before it’s too late.”
About that time, Cormier ran into Dennis Stack, who was thinking along the same lines after losing his father and watching his mother suffer the ravages of Alzheimer’s. The loss caused him to rethink his priorities.
“I realized my two-year old daughter would never have the chance to know her grandparents. And it wasn’t just my daughter … I was so wrapped-up in my career, I knew very little about my own family history.”
Cormier and Stack teamed-up to start LegacyStories.org, a website that makes it easy for people to share and preserve family histories. The site was one of the first to be certified by FamilySearch.org, the world's largest collection (3.3 billion records and counting) of free genealogy resources. That certification allows LegacyStories members to link their stories to the records of family members in the FamilySearch database.
While technology has made it fairly simple to record audio and write stories of family members, there’s still the problem of preserving digital media over time. And as most of us have learned the hard way, computer hard drives are a notoriously poor place to trust with precious memories.
That’s where LegacyStories comes in – it’s a place to store and share such treasures. And in that sense, it’s a way to save time in a bottle.