A Library Burning...

“When an elder dies, a library burns to the ground." - African proverb

        In life and death, we are all “perishable resources." If the above African proverb is true, then if you think about it, you and I are a library in flames. Each of us has a message inside us that must be preserved before the fire consumes it to ash. It is a race against time - perhaps one of the few in this life that truly matters. This is why I journal, and this is why I choose to be a genealogist. Sadly, it took losing both my grandparents and watching the embers of their fires dying out before I woke up to the smell of distant fires burning. Each year we grow older, it becomes harder to recall the singed memories that came before it. Forget mentioning the onset of dementia and Alzheimer's, an all-too-familiar assassin in my family tree... Much can still be lost to time well before then. The image of a library burning invokes a tragic loss of history never to be seen or felt again. Certainly, the ancient burning of the Great Library (also called Museum) of Alexandria was a tragedy whose ripples are still felt by today's historians and scholars. Likewise, many U.S. genealogists have experienced frustrating research gaps due to the loss of the 1890 Census in the 1921 Commerce Building fire.¹ 

The NoMad Hotel Library | https://artisticframe.com/browse/gallery.asp?galleryid=14

        So this is a call to preserve and pass down. The good, the bad, and the ugly. As parents and teachers, certainly, the goal is to pass down and instill the good. But you don't filter the bad, because hard lessons are learned there as well that may save the next generation from making the same mistakes themselves. We don't learn from our past history by burying, burning, or tearing it down, but by studying it and resolving to change our current and future generation. It then becomes part of our testimony. It saddens me to see the many monuments to history and school textbooks that have been altered, removed, or destroyed in the name of censorship, political correctness, or religion, whether it be the Nazi book burnings in 1930s Germany and Austria, the many ancient cultural sites destroyed by ISIS in the Middle East, or Founding Fathers and Civil War history censored or torn down in 21st Century America.

        In the digital age, I often ponder the future fate of libraries. With everything accessible online, things are certainly more portable and lightweight to carry, but in my opinion not quite the same. I treasure the memories of Saturday morning family trips to the library, library time in elementary school, Scholastic Book Fairs, Pizza Hut's BOOK IT! program, and Reading Rainbow... The dusty smell of a library book, the dim fluorescent lights, the intentional stillness and subdued noise; there's just something about picking up and reading a good book, and becoming more lost within its world at each turn of the page. City libraries are becoming a thing of the past. And what will become of us? Like the elder, when we die, a wealth of knowledge and culture will be lost. But as genealogists, we are family historians, time-traveling detectives, and guardian archivists. It is our responsibility to become a student of our family libraries while they are still here and to rediscover and rebuild them from the ashes for the others after they're gone. I can tell you from experience the former is much easier than the latter. 

        I can see the smoke... Can you? It's time. 

        What will you preserve and pass down? How? What will your legacy be?

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1. See “First in the Path of the Firemen: The Fate of the 1890 Population Census, Part 1," by K. Blake, 1996, Prologue Magazine, 28(1). https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1996/spring/1890-census-1.html