RootsTech 2016 | Bruce Feiler (Keynote)

good morning what a wonderful occasion what how great it is to see this room full of people and who else here besides me is a first timer at roots tech but we should welcome them come on let's go I feel like you know with between the the Super Bowl of politics that is you know amongst us and around us all all this weekend the Superbowl of football that's coming up this weekend this feels to me like the Super Bowl of storytelling and I'm very yes I'm very honored to to be a part of it I should say I've come here today to tell you a story it's a story that I've actually never really told before so in the words of my ten year old daughters I am nervous sighted meaning a little bit nervous and a little bit excited and it's a story about how I came to be a person who talks so much about family stories I wasn't always this way I wasn't even always a storyteller I was not a child prodigy genealogist here doing it from the crib and yet it's become such a big part of my life and so I want to tell you that story so here goes I was born in Savannah Georgia I come from I am the fifth generation of Jews from the American South that means I have relatives who fought on both sides of what my father still called the War of Northern Aggression in fact as long as we're doing shows of hands who anybody's any Southerners here with us today we're always a minority no matter where we go we're a minority so I grew up in Savannah Georgia as I said and I think what that means for me is that I had these two storytelling traditions both the Southern tradition and the Jewish tradition that was sort of bubbling up inside of me long before I was even aware of it we came here my family took a trip out west when I was 12 and we came to Salt Lake City and I remember three things about that trip number one that the streets were wide enough for a carriage with two horses to make a u-turn in which as you all know is still true today number two we went to see the Tabernacle Choir in that spectacular space and number three we went down into the basement of the research facility and we began to do some family history but even then I wasn't the one in my family who really latched on to family history as a passion I am the second son you see and for those of you who may be familiar with your Bible you know which the first son who gets off the responsibilities and the second son who gets all the privileges right so Ishmael is the first and Isaac you know he gets the birthright he saw his first and Jacob he gets the birthright the Joseph he's the youngest son of all so it was my older brother who became the family history person and even then I didn't know that it would be my life's calling so I graduated from high school and I left the South I went north I went to Yale and I found in the process of leaving home that I learned more about myself as a southerner and as a person by leaving where I came from and going to a new place and so in 1986 I decided I was born in the age of discount airfare I would go abroad I would leave America and see if I could learn about myself as an American and I moved to Japan and I did man I had a homestay family in that first night I was on my very best behavior and I moved in with his family they didn't speak a word of English at the time I didn't speak a word of Japanese and they served dinner what do you do you serve your honored guests your best dish and I was game I was prepared for all the Japanese food and then my homestay mother she put down in front of me liver pie now I would have eaten almost anything but it was a little bit of a struggle to get to this liver pie and I was very proud of myself and then the next morning I learned my first lesson about life in Japan which is that breakfast is cold leftovers from the night before so on day 2 in Japan I was served cold liver pie for breakfast and I got up and I wrote a letter home and I that began this process of writing these letters home that me for the next three years and these were sort of you can't believe what just happened to me today variety and when I went back home a few years later to Savannah everywhere I went in my hometown people said to me I loved your letters and I said have we met yeah and it turned out that my grandmother had zero these were I mean I'm so old these were written on crinkly airmail paper right and they my grandmother had Xerox them and passed them around they went viral in a 1986 sense of the word and then I began to realize well maybe this storytelling thing is the right calling for me in my life and so through most of my 20s I traveled around the world and I wrote about my experiences I wrote a series of books I wrote a book about Japan I wrote a book about Oxford and Cambridge I wrote a book about country music based on the two years I spent traveling around with Garth Brooks and Wynonna and Waylon Jennings and yes it's true I did spend a year performing as a clown in a traveling circus and I have to say it's very good that I have a timer in front of me because if I started telling circus stories we would be here all afternoon I had in that year what I called seven circus sins murder rape bigamy best reality group sex organized crime if you find in America I found it in the circus and then in the middle of Acts where I can really sort of at the end of that experience I decided to go visit a friend who was living in Jerusalem and again let me see a show of hands who here has been to Israel or to Jerusalem to the Middle East well on my first day we just saw those beautiful images up on on the screen my friend took me on this tour to this promenade under my first day I my friend gave me this tour and pointed in the south there's this controversial neighborhood and then he pointed to that golden dome in the center of the city and he said that is the rock where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac and it just struck me and me these are real places that you can touch and visit and feel and I had this idea what if I retrace the Bible through the desert and read the stories along the way actually what I said to myself which for a long time I didn't say publicly was what if I joined the Bible as if it were the circus and seek to become a part of it most people told me I was crazy but I found this archeologist and the two of us spent off and on for a year making this journey we climb Mount Ararat looking for Noah's Ark we went down the spine of Israel visiting all the places of Abraham Isaac and Jacob we went down into Egypt we crossed the Red Sea we spent weeks in the Sinai and then we trekked up the banks of the Jordan and we ended on top of Mount Nebo where Moses dies overlooking the Promised Land and I want to tell you one story actually that does capture that experience and that happens that is the most spiritual place I've spent most of the last 20 years of my life going around the world going on spiritual pilgrimages and my favorite place of all the ones I've ever visited is deep in the southern Sinai the Sinai is this giant wedge this giant triangle of unoccupied land between Africa and Asia 20,000 square miles of nothing and in the very southern Sinai there is a monastery that was built 1,500 years ago by visiting monks who said that one bush is the actual bush where Moses heard the voice of God and they built this monastery there where they still have services five times a day in Byzantine Greek so I spent a night in this in this monastery on the side I would go visit the burning bush okay so I went it was very dark and kind of creepy and I went down this staircase there was a room with a crypt of all the skulls of all the monks who've ever lived in st. Catherine's Monastery they spill out of this crypt like Cheerios onto the floor and I go and there and I sit next to this burning bush so the burning bush it's very tall a second a weeping willow tree it's actually a raspberry bramble which in fact is quite rare because it takes a lot of water to live in the desert and the monks say it's been in the same place since Moses was there about 3,200 years ago that's actually not true they actually moved it across a small walkway so they could expand the church now my guess is that some of you were on committees you know maybe in your church or your school or your office or your community can you imagine being in the room where you have to take the vote as to whether to move the burning bush or not so anyway I'm sitting down there and I'm convinced I'm having this moment right there's this he'd come from the bush and this heat I'm gonna have this transcendental life-changing moment and then I notice off to one side is a fire extinguisher now at first I think this is an eyesore and then I realize the unintended consequences is this in case the burning bush catches on fire and if the burning bush does catch the fire I put the fire out or do I look for the face of God I'm very sort of discombobulated and and I'm and I'm not sure what to do in this white cat with a brown patch over it so I looks out for me from this bush and screeches at me and I screech back and I go running back to my room and study my Byzantine Greek for the morning I tell that story here to make a point and that is you can't understand the biblical story I've come to realize without understanding the desert in all the the most important breakthroughs in the story whether it's Abraham leaving his family's house going for the Promised Land whether it's the Israelites leaving Egypt and going into the wilderness Israel leaving Jerusalem and going to be by the rivers of Babylon the greatest breakthroughs occur not when they are comfortable not in the best of times but when they're in the wilderness in the worst of times and what I want to see to you to all of you who tells stories either professionally or as a personal passion take your lesson from these oldest stories that have been passed down don't just tell the wonderful moments of your family find a way to delve into the most difficult moments we are all connected to this story what I realized is that this was my family story in fact I'm working on a book now about Adam and Eve called the first love story that says all of our relationships have a model in this earlier early relationship I was in Israel a few weeks ago working on this book and I met an archaeologist he said think about this there were 20 million stories in the ancient world how many ended up in the Bible maybe two dozen think about how good those have to be so what I want to tell you is when you're working on your family history and your family stories run everything by through what I call the campfire test wood the stories work around the campfire do they have the emotion do they have the passion and yes do they have the pain in order to endure so after walking the Bible came out I became this person who was traveling all over the world I went back to Iraq and Iran and wrote a book about the second half of the Bible I wrote a book about Abraham I wrote a book about Moses that actually also got me deeply involved in Salt Lake City because of how deeply the Mormons story happens to echo with the story of the Israelites leaving the Promised Land going into the wilderness building this beautiful city were where we're standing here today and I was for all intents and purposes the walking guide until in 2008 I took a blood test that showed there was something wrong with my leg and I had to stand and an x-ray and an MRI and then I got a call from my doctor the tumor in your leg is not consistent with a benign tumor I stopped walking and it took my mind a second to convert that double negative into a much more horrifying single negative I have cancer and suddenly I was the walking guy who was facing that story I just said I had had this life of green and of plushness with a nice career and a wonderful wife and young children and suddenly I was facing the prospect that I might never walk again that afternoon I went home and my young three year old twin daughters came into the room and they were doing this dance they had just learned in school and they were spiraling and spinning and they tumbled to the ground laughing with all the joy in the world I crumbled I kept imagining all the walks I wouldn't take with them the art projects I wouldn't supervise the boyfriends I wouldn't scowl at the aisles I wouldn't walk down what they wonder who I was I thought would they yearn for my discipline my love my voice two days later I woke with an idea of how I could give them that voice I would reach out to men from all parts of my life and ask them to be a part of the lives of my children and in fact they could be my voice if I couldn't be my voice and I decided to call this group of men the Council of dads and what happened to me in this moment is what happens to many of you in moments of pain or difficulty or hardship or dislocation is I wanted to record who I was I wanted to write down what had happened to me I wanted to tell my story and so over the next year as I went through this exhausting horrifying year of procedure which involved nine months of chemo and a 17 hour surgery in which doctors took out my left femur replaced it with titanium took my fibula from my calf and relocated it to my thigh where it now lives and took out half of my quadricep a surgery so rare only two people before me had ever survived it what I did during this year was I did I set out to write my story I interviewed all these men about lessons that they would want to give from my life to my children I interviewed my own father and I set out to learn about the lives of my grandparents my grandfathers and other father figures in my life that I hadn't known in many ways it's what many of you were involved in on a daily or nightly basis and what I learned in this experience is really the second thing that I want to bring forward and leave you with today when you talk to people about family history one of the things at least that I hear most often is it's too difficult I don't have time the court house burned down where the records are they got wet I don't have the money to go back to wherever I came from I can't get the whole thing both of my grandparents when I went to that my grandfather's were dead one of my father's had left behind 22 audio tapes which I translated and went through which I was able to learn but my other father was not he died sudden my other grandfather he died suddenly I hadn't left anything behind except for a collection of three volumes of epitaphs he had devoted his life to collecting epithets what people wrote on their gravestones so think about this Here I am a man thinking in my forties thinking about dying to find out that my dead grandfather had spent his entire life collecting epitaphs so I don't have his whole life story but what I have is this one interesting thing about him and I could pull I could tug on that string so when I want to tell you was just as a writer speaking to a store as a storyteller speaking to storytellers you don't need the whole picture in fact some ways the best sometimes the best way to tell a big story is to tell a small story and to tell it in depth and to tell it in a way that you can find passion in and somebody else can find passion and connection through your passion so something else happened to me during this year during this time that I was fighting cancer and the two years that I was on crutches suddenly I couldn't travel anymore but I still had this curiosity and I began to apply it to the home where I was I took all this that I had this passion and energy and enthusiasm and research and wanting to know the thing that drove me for so many years and I applied it to my own family as you many of you know and as you just heard I've spent the last seven or eight years involved in this exercise I write a monthly column on families in the New York Times I wrote a book called the secrets of happy families but I know many of you have told me about as I've gotten to know you over Twitter and Facebook over the last few weeks leading up to this and in the sense I've been trying to answer a simple question what is the secret sauce that holds families together anymore what is it they make some families effective and resilient I really have tried to know one thing what is it that happy families do right and what can I learn from them to make my family happier I've learned a lot of things over the years that I've been working on this I have what I call mine on list list of things that high functioning families have in common they adapt all the time they go out and play they fight smart but what I want to tell you here in the time that I have left is what I really deeply have come to believe is the one thing the one secret ingredients the high functioning families have in common and that is they talk a lot and not just the difficult conversations as important as those are but they talk about what it means to be part of a family and what I want to do here today and though in the few minutes I have left is I want to shake you up a bit I want to ask you to look at family the family history from a slightly different point of view I want to get you to upend some of your expectations and get you to look about look look at this question from a slightly different angle and what I want to do is I want to leave you with three big things that you can do on a daily basis to enhance your family to talk about what it means to be part of a family and to deepen the passionate engagement that you are all are all already involved in okay so here's the three s things that you can do to talk about your family on a regular basis item number one you can write a family mission statement I talked to Jim Collins Jim as many of you know wrote good to great the defining management book of our time and he told me that high-functioning groups of any kind whether it's a company or a non-profit or a religion or a family they have two things in common they stimulate progress okay they change they adapt that's what I was referring to earlier but they also preserve the core and he recommended that we go through this process of writing a family mission statement and when I first heard of this I thought that's a little cold that's a little corporate that's a little corny I can handle corny I used to be a circus clown I like country music but then someone asked me a question which is the question I want to ask you you all are committed to family history you talk about this a lot if I went to the people in your family okay your children your grandchildren your cousins your aunt your uncle's your brothers and I said what values are most important to all of you could your the people in your family could they tell me when someone asks me I thought well I'd like to think they could but frankly they'd have to divine it because we've never articulated it sometimes we can be so involved in the facts and the figures of family history that we forget to pull out a theme and to draw the lessons we want others around us so Jim coached us through this process of creating a family mission statement if my wife were standing here today she would say of all of the dozens of ideas that I came home with that we tried in our family that this is one of the top three most meaningful that we did we gathered everybody together we had the family equivalent of a corporate retreat we had a pajama party in fact I had these striped pajamas from Hannah Anderson that I had never worn before we got them all together I learned that my kids had never had they thought popcorn came from a movie theater or a microwave so I decided to make popcorn and sure enough I burned the first batch we were on our way to a memorable experience right and then we asked some questions what do you like fast about our family okay when you're away from our family would you miss when others come over what are you most like to show them and we had the most incredible conversation and we ended up a list with a list of things that were very meaningful to be part of our family okay we are not travelers we are we're not tourists we are travelers yo we help others to fly one of my wife's favors I don't like dilemmas I like solutions and then early on right on one of my kids got into a spat at school and we got summoned to the principal's office okay now we thought oh my gosh we have Mean Girls what are we gonna do and we decided we had to do something we brought my children into my office and my wife is it runs an organization that supports entrepreneurs and 25 countries as she's a commanding person she was totally stammering her way through this conversation ah yeah she don't know what to do she was not used to being called to the principal's office this list our family mission statement was on the wall and she said to my daughter's well to my daughter who was there and do any of those seemed to apply and my daughter looked up and she said we bring people together and boom suddenly we had a way into this conversation one thing we've learned from positive psychology is if you want to make yourself a better person if you want to run a marathon or lose weight or write a book or cook a better batch of brownies you have to identify which what the psychologists call your best possible self what this is doing is identifying our best possible selves who do we want to be as a family do we live up to this on a daily weekly or even monthly basis absolutely not but it's there as a reminder we've drawn the lessons from our family and identify them for all of us to try to live up to so there's something you can do to make family history a daily occurrence you can write a family mission statement next you can do storytelling games in your family okay here's three quick ideas autobiography nine we know beginning at age five children can tell stories about who they are but they need to practice okay researchers looked at American families and Asian families and the Asian families when they were telling stories about the day they were focused much more on discipline and order and following structure the American families were doing much more to tell stories they asked what the psychologists call elaborative questions that those of us in journalism used to know as who what when where how and why and they were pulling out these stories and they went back three years later and they looked at the Asian children and sure enough they were more focused on discipline and order and structure and the Western children were more focused about story and who they are don't think this matters research has shown if your child or grandchild or anybody in your family has a big test tomorrow maybe it's the school test maybe it's a performance maybe it's an athletic competition maybe it's a big presentation at work if you tell a story the night before a big event that emphasizes that you have done this in the past and you have performed well it will increase your chances of doing well the next day storytelling as a way of building confidence going back into your own history can boost your performance going forward next we know that when you travel with your family if you tell a story while you're traveling if you go through a museum and you're constantly telling this is what we're noticing this is what we're seeing if in the end of a journey of a family travel experience you tell a story you can actually embed the positive resilient together in this narrative that you want to create it's not just that any trip will produce positive memories you actually have to practice and embed those memories we learned this we do this thing not when we travel with our children at the end of every trip we write a short poem about what we did to try to capture those memories in in their own minds and be able to have them refer back to it later and then the last thing I want to say on this idea of making memories especially we heard Steve earlier talking about engaging young people Millennials and teenagers use pictures we know now because of cell phones that more pictures are taken every day then we're taken in the first century of photography so young people it may not be the natural vernacular that all of us have but young people are using storytelling more for pictures and that's the way to engage them because they have this camera with them at all times so do storytelling games tell your family history and now the last thing I want to talk to you about in the many years I've been writing my families is the single most interesting idea I wrote about this in the New York Times a few years ago and it was the most emailed article for an entire month the web the app pocket where you can save articles of the eight hundred and fifty million articles saved the year I wrote about this the the article that had the idea I'm about to tell you about was the second-most saved on the entire planet for the entire year and the idea was this tell your family history researchers at Emory Marshall Duke and Robin five-ish gave children a series of tests they did this test first in the summer of 2001 with four dozen families and they asked them do you know where your grandparents were born do you know an aunt or an uncle who had an illness that they overcame do you know your parents went to high school what was happening in your parents lives around the time that you were born the children who knew more who did best on this test meaning who knew more about their family history it was the they compared these results with a raft a psychological test it was the number one predictor of a child's emotional well-being and the belief that they could affect the world around them it was the number one predictor of a child's happiness why is it what Marshall Duke said to me is that these children have a sense that they are part of an intergenerational self a narrative that goes back deep in time so that when they have difficulties they know that someone in their family also had difficulties and the number one question I've been asked about this is what about adopted children Marshall Duke has four children three are natural born one is adopted it has nothing to do with why gee it has to do with talking about what it means to be part of your family I said this was done in 2001 at the end of the study came 9/11 and they went back and they tested these killed Rinna ghin and the children who had performed best were able to bounce back from that national trauma most effectively and there are three there's three narratives and families as Marshall explained to me there's what they call an ascending narrative we came from nothing we worked hard we have a lot there's a descending narrative we came out we have a lot then there was a war or a recession or a storm and we lost it all or there's what we call an oscillating family narrative your grandfather was the first in his family to go to school he became vice president of a bank then his his house burned down then his son also had a good a successful life and his wife got breast cancer the children who understand that they come from an oscillating narrative know that when they hit hardships and they will hit hardships they know that they can get through them that they can push through not because of what they saw in a movie or a book because of people in their own family so what I've been trying to say to you today is essentially three things number one take your story and ground it in the oldest stories that have ever been told go back and connect your story to your community to your faith to your school to your company to your country to whatever it is connect your story to the oldest stories ever told second find a way to make sure that these stories are not just something that are living inside the computers but are everyday and the third thing is don't just keep it to yourself share it with those around you do it at the dinner table at the car pool when you're taking a walk when you're folding the laundry make family history part of your everyday and this sounds easy especially for all of you because you've come to this event but what I want to tell you is that it's harder than you think because our instinct is to protect our children and our family we don't want them to know that we've had pain or there's been suffering on our families we have to get over those stinks we have to fling open our cupboard doors and in an age-appropriate way share with them the difficulties that we and our family members have survived and so I want to end actually by asking making a request of all of you six months after I wrote that article after the secrets of happy families was published I got a call from my mother one day that my father who's been fighting Parkinson's for the last two decades was in a very difficult place he was unable to walk and he was losing the confidence and enthusiasm he had for the life around him and my family does what we do in those situations and we snapped into action and my brother was focused on my father's medical care my sister was focused on my mom but as I've been saying to you I've become the family storytelling person and so I engaged in this process with my father where every week I would send him a question and we went through this process it took almost two years where I helped him tell the story of his own life and go through his life and find meaning by going through not just the joyful occasions but also the painful ones and at the end of this two years we produced a book of his life stories now I'm a writer but I'm here to tell you my father had never written anything longer than a memo in his entire life and this process was incredibly enriching and it's part of something I've heard from people now all over the world is I've talked more and more about families and so I am going to write a book about this experience I've had with my father doing family history and I know all of you are in the cutting edge of this you've thought about this much more deeply and for a far longer time than I so I would like to invite you to tell me your stories I'm very easy to get a hold of you can find me on Twitter you can go to my author page on Facebook you can go to Bruce Viacom please tell me what you have found and help me tell this story of how we can help older people in our lives make family history part of their daily life on the one year anniversary of my diagnosis with cancer I went to see my doctor his name is John Healy by the way Healy great name for a doctor and I said to him doctor if my children come to you someday and say what should we learn from our experience what would you tell them and he said I would tell them what I've learned and that is everybody dies but not everybody lives I want you to live and so I come before you today fifty years after I was born in Savannah thirty years after I first went to Japan and wrote one of those letters home 20 years after I set out to walk the Bible and my family's story ten years after the birth of my children and I'm pleased to say eight years after I was first diagnosed with cancer and I say to you may you find a way to connect your family story with the oldest stories ever told may you find a way not just to talk about the green and bountiful moments but about the moments in the Exile in the moments in desert the moments of pain and may you find a way to take your passion for family history and pass it on to subsequent generation and especially to our children who need it in order to believe that they can have a life of passion that they can control with dignity happiness and togetherness and I say to you as someone who used to be the walking guy who lost the ability to walk but who can now walk again every now and then find a friend take a walk and share a story

Channel: FamilySearch

Views: 18,999

Rating: 4.7567568 out of 5

Keywords: rootstech, familysearch, rootstech 2016, genealogy, family history, family stories, familysearch genealogy

Id: i8sZl-Ny2D0

Length: 32min 44sec (1964 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2016