Retirees work to preserve family stories on Internet
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By COLLEEN KENNEY / Lincoln Journal Star
The beautiful little girl in the photo looks like a young Natalie Wood in “Miracle on 34th Street.”
Her hair is braided and pinned across the top of her head. Her skin is smooth, a few freckles on the nose. She wears an embroidered yoke collar and above it, a big smile.
She’s the adored baby of the family, a breach baby born in Ashland in 1927.
I’ve heard it said that breach babies always have trouble with their hips. Maybe that’s why I have so much trouble with mine.
It’s one of many old photos spread out on the daybed in Faye James’ computer room.
She lives in an apartment at the The Landing at Williamsburg, a retirement community, with her husband.
Their apartment is bright now with the morning sun.
Faye speaks slowly. She walks slowly. Parkinson’s disease, she explains, though no tremble, thank goodness.
“I think I was in fourth grade there,” she says, smiling down at the little girl. “My mom liked to braid my hair in two pigtails and then put it around my head like that.”
Lots of things happened in that little girl’s life, Faye says. Big things, like marrying Phil and having three kids, building a two-story house in Lincoln on Cottonwood Drive. The Parkinson’s.
Phil’s mother was crippled with Rheumatoid Arthritis and she couldn’t walk from the time he was in high school until her death. It just doesn’t seem fair that he has to have a crippled wife, too.
Little things. Like the time the neighbors asked her family to watch their dog for a few days. And then the dog didn’t want to go home. They even stopped feeding him.
So he’d go home to eat, then come back to their house.
Tuffy.
She doesn’t want stories like that to fade until they’re forgotten. Or photos like this one of the girl with the braids.
“These are all going to go on-line.”
She’s about to “upload” those photos, she explains, to add to her autobiography on a new national Web site, “The Remembering Site.”
She helped create it.
For the past year, she and several other residents and employees of The Landing have helped test drive the site, working out bugs and making suggestions. The site gets people like Faye to type up their memories as a gift to their children and friends.
The Landing was picked to be a test site after one of site’s creators happened to visit. She was so impressed with the happy atmosphere here. And with the state-of-the-art computer room.
Faye points out other photos on the daybed.
Here’s one of her sitting on the porch between her two older sisters.
Oh, how her own named irked her so. She was born “Ila Faye.”
I can remember that my sister belonged to a Dorothy club … She had a round robin letter that she sent on to other Dorothys across the country. It always irked me because I could never have such a club. Who ever heard of an Ila Faye?
She had a brother, she writes. He was the oldest. He died before he was a year old.
My mother had German Measles during the pregnancy and it left the baby with a weak heart.
There’s a photo on the daybed of her and Phil on their wedding day in 1951, looking more perfect than the couple on the white wedding cake.
When she quit her job as a music teacher and stayed home with the kids, she writes, Phil always made her feel important, that the money he made as an economics professor was their money.
When she got Parkinson’s, he wanted to move to a place like this with elevators and hand rails in the hallway.
He was too humble, she says, smiling, to put his autobiography online.
The Web site asks hundreds of questions to help shake the memories loose.
Did you know when you very first met your mate that this would be your life’s partner?
No. I had met Phil’s sister at the University of Nebraska and we had become friends. When Phil came home from the Navy his sister had picked me out for him. I was having no part of it. However, when he called me for our first date, he asked for a date for every week. I guess he thought he’d “sew up” those dates from the very start. So I guess he felt from the start that I should be his life partner. However, my mother didn’t want me to marry and that made a decision much harder for me.
What holiday did you especially like?
Christmas … When I was growing up times were really hard and we had very little money to spend celebrating Christmas. … I discovered that the teachers bought trees for the school rooms and many had families elsewhere in Nebraska so when the school closed for Christmas vacation they discarded those trees. I found that if I asked first I could have the tree to take home and we would have a real tree. …
I would go to the teacher after school that last day and drag the tree home for us to put up.
Faye titled her autobiography “Growing Up in Nebraska.” She dedicated it to their three children. It’s a work in progress, she says. She tries to answer a few questions a day.
And today, she just remembered she has to add that story about Tuffy. She knows there’s a photo of him somewhere — Tuffy at their feet during a big family dinner.
When she finds it, she’ll upload that one, too.
Reach Colleen Kenney at 473-2655 or ckenney@journalstar.com.
‘The Remembering Site’
The Landing at Williamsburg, a retirement community in south Lincoln, recently helped launch a national Web site called “The Remembering Site,” which collects autobiographies and photos from people across the nation who want to preserve family histories.
For the past year, six residents and two employees of The Landing have been testing the site by writing up their own memories, working out the bugs and making suggestions to improve the site. The autobiographies can be e-mailed to family and friends.
For more information, check out www.therememberingsite.org.
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