Sharing Difficult Family Stories (Live with Rachael Rifkin and Sydney Walker)

um sydney and rachel thank you thank you thank you for participating and for people joining us we're here on wednesday we were live yesterday i know this is so exciting you get family search two days in a row um we are talking about a really interesting topic today and one that i think we don't talk about enough and that is kind of discovering understanding some of our more difficult family history stories and so i'm gonna have sydney and rachel introduce themselves and then we'll kind of just jump in but those of you who are joining us let us know where you are and if you have participated before but sydney why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself okay thank you thank you andy for having me so my name is sydney walker i'm a reporter for the deseret news in salt lake city i write for the church news which is an official publication of the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints and one of the many topics i cover is family history and you've been doing that for how long i've been doing that for about a year and a half so not too long i don't claim to be a family history expert but through many articles i've written i've learned just a little bit so and i think to sydney i'm gonna have you introduce yourself and i'm gonna interrupt you apparently you are also representing someone who speaks to and gets stories about other people and so i think that's a really great lens for today so yes doing that for how long have you been doing that um how long have i been writing yes um oh goodness probably a couple years ever since school um down at byu so and what you're talking about the the lens that i bring so i wrote a series for the church news on some of the healing benefits of family history and so i hope to be able to share some of those stories and some of those experiences with you yes yes okay we're excited and rachel wow this is so fun to have you here and i have to just say um i first discovered you when you went viral a few years ago so tell us who you are and how you went viral well hi thanks for having me um i went viral because i did this photo project um with my ancestors basically what i did was i posed as eight of my ancestors um so i dressed up like them and i tried to mimic their poses and i also wrote like a little story next to it um that compared our similarities and the idea was to get people thinking about the similarities that run in our families um and let's see i am a family history ghost writer so i help people write up their life stories and turn them into books and i'm also a journalist wow and wow and you've done some really interesting um work in the space of understanding some of the stories that might be a little more difficult so so both of you we're super glad that you're here and maybe before we get into sort of the heavier stories what's a favorite family story of yours that you'd like to share with us that helps us get to know you a little better uh sydney you can go first okay i'll go first so i'll tell you kind of a fun discovery i had so last year um in the uh excuse me in the united states we celebrated 100 years of the 19th amendment granting women the right to vote and in utah we celebrated 150 years of utah women first voting so i wrote a lot of articles on that um and one day when i was looking through the archives i came across this photo that had some of the women i had been writing about emmeline b wells lizard snow these big figures in utah women's history and lo and behold my fourth great grandmother was in this photo with them um i didn't really know much about her at the time but from finding that photo i ended up doing a lot of research on her and it just made everything so much more real i just it was so neat to be able to take a topic that i've been writing about and spent so much so many hours researching and then to know wow my fourth great grandmother was part of this and how he affects me today so that was kind of a fun discovery oh i love that thank you so much for sharing that and um have you been to the the installation up across from the capitol that that can remember okay you'll have to go i had an island on one of our live streams and she talked about better days 2020 so very cool rachel what about you well my favorite family story is uh incorporates me actually when i was 26 i found my grandfather's korean war memoir and he wrote those letters um that the memoir was based on to my grandmother when he was 27. so it was like being able to get to know him as like a peer or a friend and it's hard to describe um the significance of that on my life like it was just amazing being able to get to know him in that way and i found all these similarities including our writing voices were very similar and i always thought my writing voice was you know uniquely mine so it felt really good to be able to get to know him in that way and that kind of got me started on helping other people save their family histories wow and i love the intimacy that comes from reading letters that are meant to kind of you know communicate about a time and a relationship that maybe they never expected anyone would ever read right well for my grandfather he specifically was hoping to get it published actually really how interesting okay okay so i love learning that about you too and and i think anyone watching like you know we all have these opportunities to kind of unearth things and sometimes they're easy to find and sometimes they're not and it kind of you know depends um okay so we're talking a little bit today about painful family stories but let's talk how have you found family stories to be a connection point between you and family or loved ones um is this something that you've seen sort of work in in your life and we'll go with rachel first on that one well i'd like to talk about um using our hardships as as an example of uh family resilience um there's all these studies that show that when you share these stories especially with kids um they'll grow up with a greater sense of resilience as well as like higher self-esteem and they see themselves as a part of like a bigger picture and a trajectory and they have more of a sense of identity which is really important i think because so often we lose our family stories and you know once certain generations pass away we we're kind of not left with anything unless we specifically recorded them so in that sense then we lose part of our identity and yeah and that's you say it like that rachel and that's ominous sounding we do not want to do that and the benefits are clear um we had robin fiveish from emory university on who's in very much an academic in the space who does a lot of research around the family narrative and stories and that's exactly what she said the resiliency that comes um sydney what about your perspective on this yeah i think in addition to that we learn more about ourselves and maybe why the way we are maybe we have a cork or maybe we have you know something some sort of trauma that happened when we were younger um it could be a variety of different things but i know for me personally learning more about my grandparents and how they were raised and how that influenced the way that they raised their children and then how my parents have raised me it's it's really interesting and insightful to be able to go back and and talk about those family stories and realize we are the way we are because because of our family yes and you know it's so funny because there are just stories or memories that may not have hardly any significance but they're funny or they're connected um and it and it's it's so interesting to see how that varies with each family and i know in my my family with my my children um i mean there's collective eye rolls when i start like bringing out the scrapbooks or things like that but guess what my grandchildren they will look at those scrapbooks because it features them um and so sometimes there's almost this like burden of like getting over there like oh gosh here we go again to like okay you guys like let's let's you know let's recount and let's tell some of these stories um and and something that's interesting is this idea of avoiding the painful stories and so i want to talk a little i mean actually we're going to talk a lot about that and sydney you're from the lens of having written some of these articles that you'll tell us about and rachel this is some of the work that you've done and you've had experience with and um and i i can be in the space with you too and here's just a little background for me i grew up with no family stories because my parents both came from really disadvantaged childhood childhoods and so they didn't talk about their childhood because it was so painful my mom's parents had both passed away before she graduated from high school and she left the tiny town she grew up in at age 17 and she only went back less than five times and it was really like like for her she just blocked it out and my dad was an only child and had a you know also a painful childhood and was very estranged from his his mother and so for him like his life started when he was kind of in college and so they didn't go back and tell like and i mean when i mean back i mean talking about their their upbringing until i don't know 10 15 years ago my mom would have a few stories that she would share about her siblings and my dad had two stories but i grew up with nothing and so my whole life has been about establishing stories for my kids but also inviting people to establish and know their own stories because it's like you grow up with the yearning and so i think being brave and saying okay there might be some things that are hard and maybe we can gently kind of look at those because not sharing them with what i experienced for so many years that's super painful too so i think sometimes they go hand in hand you have to have the pain sometimes in order to have the connection that family stories um can bring us so and and and i love and honor my parents and and appreciate that they did the best that they could do but you know it's interesting that this is where i've ended up professionally because it was such a such something i craved so what do we do when we discover a painful story knowing that none of us are psychiatrists or psychologists but we are coming from the lens of our personal experience um what do we do who wants to take that one rachel well i would say you can start by by letting the person know that you're interested and talk about it in a gentle way you don't want to be super probing or like you have to tell me um you could even say something like you know you're interested you wonder how this affected our family and um how it affected me and you want to also leave the space open to listen to the person and let them share whatever happened um because sometimes people don't share because they don't think anyone cares as well and then that can happen for um you know hard family history or any kind of family history um so you want to let them know first that you're interested and then you want to leave it up to them um and even let them know like if if they're not okay with doing it now like you're always open um to hear that story okay i love that so gentle and curious but not probing and then gracious in when and if they want to share and letting that person know that you're interested um i think those are that that is fantastic um sydney in your experience with talking with people who have kind of lived through this what would you recommend i think rachel's point about oh you know people think that others aren't interested in the story was really interesting because i i found that people are a lot more willing to share than we might think they are one thing that really surprised me about this series i wrote is how many people were willing to be vulnerable and share their story with their name and a photo that was something really important to me while doing this story or these series is that um that readers could be able to read and identify and and realize that these are real people that you know we're not immune from this every family has the good and and the hard um and and that it's okay to open up and and so the fact that these people are willing to talk and share their photos and share their stories include their names um and and a lot of these interviews took multiple tries you know ask a few questions and then say okay let's think on this let's circle back here's what i had is this right are you comfortable sharing this um just being patient working through that process is another thing i learned okay i really i really appreciate that too i think having some sort of artifact you know like you mentioned a photo but then the the patience and always going back and then being respectful if they don't want to share um you know then like rachel said you know i'm here if you change your mind um i i think is is really great and have you and maybe sydney you can share something from one of the articles you did like how has discovering a painful story or kind of living through a painful story impacted people that you've seen in your experience yeah yeah um i'll tell you the story about one lady that i interviewed um her name is cameron and she lost her father to suicide um he had some psychological reactions from ending the medication it was very very tragic and this this experience kind of rocked her world this was her her rock her her spiritual giant um and she said shortly after his passing that she had this impression come to mind that said don't let this one moment in time define your father that's not who he was that's not who he is you need to find a way to celebrate and honor his life and so what she did is she started adding memories of him to the family search app um the memories app um and so she said that you know photo after photo and story actor story that she would record even listening to audio cassette tapes of of an audio journal that he kept was very healing for her just to be able to honor his life and so that that that one event wouldn't define him forever so that was really impactful and um surely impacted me i was so touched by that story just to realize how how much we can help preserve the memories and and the legacy of those that have passed on before us and and i like how you you talked about cameron cameron recording how cameron i mean she could have you know stepped back and said this is too painful i you know but instead she headed towards and she commemorated and connected and then she made that possible for other people and to me that's extremely brave and generous and um and so maybe let's be reminded that there there's gonna be some discomfort and some emotions that you may not ever want to feel but but i would prefer to have an ex someone like cameron do that than than be in my shoes with no stories right and so um and i respect what my parents have done i'm not i'm not saying that but i'm saying it's a brave thing what what she did so maybe you know gearing up and heading into that emotional space the outcome can be so beautiful and and it ended up being such a good thing for her yes you could have been afraid and just said no oh i love that story and and rachel you talk about um ways to honor those who have passed on um and i don't know if we want to go into that yet or if you want to talk about i don't even remember the question i asked that thanks i'm so into this moment but um you can go at whatever direction you want we can go into honoring loved ones or you can respond to the other question well i thought maybe i'd share a little bit uh a story from my family history i i also wrote about it um basically what happened was my grandfather's uh grandparents first child paula passed away at the age of five months and i traced um basically the effect that it had on my family um so she was the first born and i kind of some like i wondered what would have happened if she had um she'd been able to make it and how that would have affected my mom specifically uh because my mom was kind of a nervous sort and she was also very empathetic and she seemed to have this role in the family of like the caretaker and she felt very responsible for people's emotions and i just kind of wondered if she'd had an older sister to kind of be that barrier for her as well as you know there wouldn't have been that trauma in the first place for the family um i just wonder how she would have been different and how that would have affected you know me and my brother um you know throughout the years we've also inherited her anxiety and and that kind of stuff so um oh and another thing i wanted to mention was that my grandparents didn't really talk about what happened too much beyond the fact that paul passed away because my grandmother didn't have a c-section and she should have had one because the baby kept bumping her head trying to get up and so then she ended up developing hydrocephalus and then passed away um so there was this absence of a story as well as like healing um so um i'm sorry i'm losing my train of thought i think where you're going is this idea that healing and learning the story go hand in hand and so by not sharing the story there also wasn't an opportunity necessarily for that nuclear family to have the healing that that they could have had that could be where you're going yeah no that what that was thank you thank you for finishing my thought um yeah they didn't really have a chance to process everything um and so that you know the burden and the sadness kind of just stayed with them and i had always looked at it as you know it was like a happy ending in the sense that they were able to have more kids but when i had kids of my own i kind of realized it's you know that pain always stays with you that grief always stays with you and the importance is in learning how to deal with it i think um and learning how to celebrate the life of a person who passed away yes okay okay we have we have a comment um and um this is okay and i haven't read these yet so i'm not sure where we're going with them um this is sarah and she's talking about it's only in looking at my painful experiences from a distance i'm assuming she means time that i can see it in a way that has allowed me to learn from it reflective hindsight when i pause to reflect it's allowed me to process the trauma so i can learn from it and then set it on emotional shelf so it no longer controls me or my future okay i absolutely love that sarah i think um it's a little bit similar to like what cameron did and maybe the what rachel's family didn't do right a little bit and what my family didn't do right it was just like a void but we don't have to live there we don't have to go there and live there um and then here's jillian is talking about how family stories can be a great find and you can share them with others and she was and i haven't read these so she was in contact with the woman who was doing searches on her husband's side of the family which was german and um they she came across some documents that allowed her to see that her father was mentioned in this dispatches so our connecting to this our stories and connecting to other people and then their stories sometimes we find these connections kind of like sydney talked about the reporting on that the suffragette movement and then these documents and going wait i have an ancestor here and rachel when you talked about the similarities that the physical similarities in the photos you also talked about the similarities in the tone of the writing your grandfather and so i think we can find commonalities and and sometimes we can find those in in the hard in the hard times and the hard stories and and i think let's talk for a minute because we are family search in family history how can we kind of honor those um stories of people who have passed on that or maybe harder stories i appreciate what cameron did sydney do you have any other examples from some of the people whose and maybe it doesn't have to be that their family has passed on but you know how can we honor those people yeah that's a great question um there was one lady i interviewed her name was lisa and she had dealt with some some trauma in her childhood that affected her physically and one of my favorite quotes from her interview is when she said i learned that telling the good and the bad was helping me heal and she talked about how she would put pictures up of her ancestors around her home and that she would look at those and that would give her strength and and um i think it was one of her ancestors whose story somewhat paralleled her mother i think her mother had gone through some divorces and some things and and so knowing that there is an ancestor in her life that had a similar story to her mother and then being able to have these pictures around um kind of was helping her heal so i think yeah having their photos recording their memories i mean there's several different ways i love that and i think being reminded you know and we're all made up of you know um i think sydney you said the good and the and and i think bringing that out and in a safe space like you don't have to broadcast it like here's my heart stories like what we're doing here but um rachel what about your perspective on sort of honoring those um those that have passed on and even their hard stories well my mom passed away like seven years ago and i like to incorporate bits of her life into mine in kind of organic ways so for instance i have a painting my grandmother did of my mom um and she's you know always in my room and i can look you know to my right and see her every day and that kind of makes me feel like her presence is there and then on her birthday i like to get out her food and some of the things she liked um she really liked collecting like turquoise necklaces and things like that so it's like a day of celebration about her and let's see what else oh like random things like she'd started this art project she did like a colored pencil by number and you know she hadn't finished it and i found it and i finished it and yeah yeah it felt like we were working on it together and so it brings any way you can bring kind of their active spirit back um to the president is helpful as well as just remembering you know people who came before us they're they're all within us in different ways especially someone like your mom that you had like a close relationship with they they live on through you and through um your actions yes i love that and you know i'm responding to these stories in the comments and um and and i'm not apologizing for this the emotion because i think i loved what you talked about celebrating her i think that's such a great idea and especially when there's a loss that is maybe um sudden or early you know and i think you know death is is something that you know it's it's always challenging it's always a loss but i love this idea of they live on in us and i think um we had somebody comment and i just um and she said this is robin and she lost four family members in five years and it started when she was 16 um and she found for her genealogy to be very healing because she was able to find other family and learn about them so there is something you know sydney you talked about photos rachel you're talking about this kind of celebration you know in the remembering that is actually healing and and and i think talking about it and documenting it what do we do with our own painful family history stories knowing that none of us are professional like therapists or anything but i think that's something there's a lot of conversation around um generational trauma these types of things but what tips or recommendations do you have um from your lens uh how we can deal with these types of things and who wants to take that one first okay rachel i think just the act of talking it out and telling your story is not only cathartic it helps you heal and then you're helping prevent generational trauma from being passed down which is a really important point um you want to be able to process it just like with any emotion if you are ignoring it then you're not fully processing it and it can pop up in different ways within your life and in a way it ends up controlling you because you're not even sure why you're doing certain things yeah so the healing comes from the recognition and the sharing and you know going back to similarities when you share these kind of things with other people in your family or you know anyone in your life um it it just really helps just being listened to really helps um i love that i i think too you know the writing you know journaling speaking however whatever method works for you personally i do a lot of audio journaling this won't surprise anybody that knows me i'm extremely verbal and so i just like journal on my phone um and it is in the speaking or for some people in the writing that i come with a reckoning of what i'm processing and then there's an opportunity perhaps to share that um and i i have to say and i'm maybe being a little usually i'm not chatty about myself but with my kids i always want to leave the door open to say hey like you know i'm sure there are things from your childhood that you would like to discuss or have some thoughts around that maybe aren't positive and that door is open that i am open to you know if it's criticisms or whatever you know um but i think too being able to say like as a family we can come together and talk about some of these things in a safe place i think that's hard and i think it's brave and i think it's essential to getting through and kind of processing um okay sydney do you have anything to add to that just just building on this idea of the benefits of sharing and what happens when we share going back to the story of cameron who lost her father to suicide so she told me this story which was then published in one of the articles i wrote and um i circled back with cameron not too long ago and she told me that after this article was published a lady reached out to her on facebook and said i just went through the exact same thing like my father who also had psychological reactions from ending to medication died by suicide and reading your story helped me and they were able to have this conversation you know through facebook messenger helping each other through this and i thought that was so amazing um and cameron said this thing i i even i still have it because i loved it she said the more we can open up and be vulnerable about our own struggles it allows others to open up and we can heal together so i think when we're willing to share something hard it opens that door for others to feel comfortable enough to reach out or begin talking so that vulnerability it goes a long way it's it's critical it's critical to connecting which is what you know family history family search we're all about right and and i've got a couple more comments that um i want to i want to read um dorothy talks about the reason she researches her family is for their honor and just to honor them and she believes that she could not be who she is without any of them their stories and tragedies makes her strong which is exactly what you guys have been saying um so what if we know that there's a hard story and how many disclaimers do i need to do not many but from our lens you know in sydney i think you who's someone who just interviews people professionally how do we broach the sensitive topic we've talked a little bit about you know rachel's advice for going and gentle and open but is there is there other tips this is this is a question from someone who's watching um terry like she's asking for suggestions on how to approach sensitive family topics what do you guys think um just building off of what we've already talked about what rachel has mentioned um i think asking open-ended questions being patient we've already highlighted that um not being afraid to be emotional with them several of the interviews i did even even though i'm a reporter and i'm supposed to be professional i was tearing up they they really these stories really impacted me um and so and it's okay to go there with them and to have that compassion and and people can feel difference right if you're just drilling them with questions or if you are trying to seek to understand um so yeah those are just a few thoughts i have i'm sure rachel has more i like this idea of open-ended and patience and you know to be empathetic with them and one of the attributes of empathy actually two of them are to hear a person's feelings and then to communicate your understanding of their feelings and that and to be in empathy is to be vulnerable because we're accessing whatever emotion we may not have had that experience but we've had disappointment or we've had heartbreak right and so i think terry putting yourself in that empathy seat of being vulnerable and open and um okay rachel what would you add to that um trying to think i kind of already covered several points um i mean the empathy thing is huge um making sure to hold space for someone um because you know we don't always do that we often want to make things like better and we'll say like oh it's okay or but you know when bad things happens it's not necessarily okay and and it's okay to say that and it's okay to to talk about that it shows us our true real rich lives and um if there's anything i've learned from this line of work is that um you gotta show both sides and um it's not all about being happy it i mean that that doesn't show the truth of our experience and we always want to get to the truth of our experiences okay and i i really appreciate what you're talking about and what you're mentioning and what we're discussing today which is difficult with family stories it it's going to be hard and and to go back on the empathy mention some of the other attributes are perspective taking this idea of someone having a different experience than you and not questioning that experience but just kind of trying it on and then being in non-judgment and this is kind of this holding space right because if we're in judgment and we're like you know then we're putting up you know actual walls and then when you hear and then communicate your understanding of their feelings and then lastly being present and mindful so you combine all of those in a listening scenario around understanding someone's difficult stories the best thing you can do is not what you're going to say you know i'm going to quote brene brown and teresa wiseman and megan devine and all of these experts in this space it isn't about your words it's about your presence and we want to make someone feel better by saying well at least or it could have been worse or they're in a better place but who does that make feel better the person speaking and it's hard to sit there and say i don't know what to say but i'm so glad i know this about you or i don't know what you're going to say but i want you to know that i want to understand the complexities of your experience right and you could talk about that as well how it would benefit you to understand what they went through and to understand how this you know affects others in the family without you know being too pressurey about it um obviously if if again that's too much for them you don't want to back down yeah but sometimes hearing about the benefits and that it's you know it's not just about reliving trauma or something like that it helps and i i know from what i've experienced is um when i'm sharing things i can share the lesson as opposed to the play-by-play or the trauma right um it doesn't i don't you may not need to they may not want to share the details but they could say because of this you know this is what i've learned or this is what i've experienced sydney what were some of the other interviews you did that you found really compelling as far as people who were able to kind of heal from um a lot of things through family history yeah i can briefly tell you two more so one um a lady named sarah she had a pretty rough relationship with her father and um struggled with that for a little while and it was a friend that encouraged her to get involved in family history and she said that by doing her dad's side of the family history and learning about complicated lives and complicating stories you know on his side helped her reconcile with him and also strengthened the relationship she had with with his side of the family as well in addition to him um so i thought that was really neat and then the second one i want to the other one i want to mention briefly there was a another sweet lady her name was maylie and she struggled a lot with and still does with anxiety and depression and she says that when she's kind of in her her darkest moments she'll turn into family history and reading her you know these stories of people in her family because she realizes through those stories that that life isn't easy that other people have gone through hard times too and and the way that they made it through their trial whatever it is can give us strength for what we're going through in the moment um so i i really liked that that takeaway of both sarah and amelie that those complicated stories and complicated lives can help us with our complicated stories and our complicated lives yes and i love how sarah's experience allowed her to kind of for almost perspective taking and understanding more um and then kind of connecting and then and and rachel i think i want to go to you on this but if we don't share the hard stories like cameron um in that article and that woman reaching out to her other people like they're gonna feel more alone so their strength and sharing right how have you seen that play out the strength in sharing well uh what comes to mind for me is um my dad and his dad had a falling out and the actually never saw each other again after i think my dad was like the age of 15 or something and my dad um didn't talk about his dad very much and then within the last like 10 15 years he started to look up online and see what happened to him and i had always kind of wondered like could he went on to marry and have more kids and it turns out he did my dad actually has four half siblings and i was able to track them down and now you know we have a relationship and i really enjoy them and they're a lot like my dad and and not like my dad and it's just you know if we hadn't explored that at all if we had just let it sit where it was i wouldn't have been able to find these people and that would have been like a huge loss for our whole family i think so it's important to to try to approach these topics and and going back to the not feeling alone especially like when we're growing up but also as adults you know our inner thoughts we wonder if we're the only ones that are ever hacking them and and when we're going through something really hard we can feel so alone and so when we we share the things that are hard and painful we make it so everyone can heal better oh you guys yeah this is fantastic yes so imagine the opportunity that we all have to take time not only to broach you know approach those sensitive topics with family members who are living to try to understand them and and perhaps gain some healing but also in our own lives to document and share those in a way that feels you know sort of appropriate and then thinking about um you know one of the things i've gotten to do at family searches is is research some of our um we call them patrons you know people who use our website and especially around memories and photos and stories and guess what stories are usually the most memorable and the most cherished and beloved stories when people share a meaningful story about them about their family history you want to guess it's also a favorite hollywood trope it's a redemption story it's a i someone in my my one of my ancestors had something really hard and they overcame it right we love those stories so we are are those stories right and everyone helps and we're all a part of it so let's just share that and not be as maybe hesitant to do so um and i think the healing can come in so many ways um what a wonderful conversation with you two and a i as we're wrapping up i'd love to hear any sort of last stories that you want to share and then please um where can we find your work and we'll make sure moderators are putting this stuff in the chat as well but but sydney let's let's go with you as we wrap up i think the the biggest thing i've learned and and again i'm not a family history expert prior to a year and a half ago i thought family history was for old people and so it was really having this assignment at work that that got me into it and and realizing that family history is family stories that sounds a lot better in my mind than family history um but just from interviewing these people about different things they've gone through that the takeaways for me have been that every family has the happy and the hard as we've talked about that healing looks different for everyone family history isn't a cure-all right and and maybe sharing an experience is is healing for someone but maybe they still need more time and now is not the time and to be respectful of that um and then also as we discussed earlier that people are more willing to talk than we think they are they just need an invitation and so sometimes we have to be brave too and ask questions at the right time um and then be patient and listen and work through that so those are some final thoughts for me i love it thank you so much sydney rachel uh well that triggered a thought with me that i think sometimes that helps if you come to these family stories with a story of your own i mean perhaps you're the younger generation and and your older relative may think oh well i can't learn anything from them but you know we all learn from each other and we've all had hardships big and small and so when we're willing to share stories the other person may be more willing to share their story as well and you know that that strengthens the relationship that you two have when you're both sharing and you're connecting and you're finding the similarities and it could lead to more storytelling and happier stories and you know there's a lot that could happen i love that and i love how you talked about similarities because i think that's a piece to remember and we talked about you know some of the you know cameron and and that story helping somebody else and it's just this web of connection and healing and like we're all in this together and less alone and um and i think it's worthwhile and brave and i think the invitation is important too that sydney mentioned and i think as sydney and rachel have talked about this is this can be something that we can do as individuals whichever however things need to be processed we don't need to be we can be hesitant and cautious but we can also be brave and bold and and share these parts of us so um rachel you are a writer as as sydney and sydney we can find your work at deseret news but rachel where can we find your work um at rachelriskin.com and my first name has two a's in it it says r-a-c-h-a-e-l and then rifkin is r i f is in frank k-i-n okay awesome thank you so much everyone for joining us and of course don't forget rootstech next week but um we will be live streaming next week as well so thank you sydney and

Channel: FamilySearch

Views: 16,083

Rating: 4.9176469 out of 5

Keywords: difficult family stories, healing stories, understanding family stories, connective stories, connections, family connection, family history, family history for beginners, family search, deseret news, storytelling, telling your story, legacy

Id: MHQs-Vj9YDA

Length: 44min 5sec (2645 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2021