Those close to me know that I’vebecome a genealogy nut over the last couple of years. I credit Matthew Broderick in his episode of “Who do you think you are” that airs on NBC. His was the first episode that I watched and, before it had ended, I was signed up at Ancestry.com investigating my own roots, attempting to answer that question myself. I’ve been hooked ever since. My maternal side has proved much easier to research than my paternal, but that hasn’t discouraged me. The findings on my mom’s side have left me feeling quite fulfilled with my research and I figure my dad’s ancestors will make themselves known… in time. I digress…
The point of this post is to talk about how, through this family history research, I have come to realize that searching my female ancestors proves especially hard. Once married, they assumed husband’s surname and, with that, became a descendant of his family line. Doing so left them pretty difficult to search for, at least in my family tree. With this discovery, I set out on a mission to document the women in my family… how could I do so, though, in a way that would be visually appealing to generations to come? After all, photographs have definitely been a fabulous find whenever I am able to come about them in my research. However, photos alone didn’t seem appropriate… after all, these were the women in my family tree and I felt they needed to be distinguished for the homemaking roles that they played. Then it hit me… RECIPES! What better way is there to document my feminine ancestral other than the recipes that they cultivated for their families?
So…
I sat and read through my mother in law’s recipes…
Wrote out my own…
Interviewed my mother and sister with regard to my own grandmother’s recipes…
It’s been quite a process, but I finally feel ready to progress to the next level, which, is documenting.
I scanned in all of their handwritten index card recipes… transcribed my own to index cards and scanned them as well. Now I plan, over the course of the next year or so, to re-create the dishes that I have selected from my families history and look forward to creating these favored family dishes for my own little troop. Then, afterward, I will photograph the completed dish and add the handwritten recipe to it in order to create a page for my family’s cookbook.
Like this…
Pretty neat right?
In the end, I’m hoping to have a family cookbook to pass on to my own children. Complete with details of who made what dish and how/when it was served. Included will be recipes from their great grandmothers, grandmothers and little old me. I also hope to include family photographs that I have accumulated in my genealogy research, as well as any anecdotes about the chefs that I might have or come across.
Most of all, I hope that this will help provide my kidlets with some sort of answer to the question that originally sparked this genealogical fixation of mine…
Who do you think you are?
