Synopsis:
Telling stories allows us to create a legacy.
Total Words
Reading Time in Minutes
5
Key Takeaways:
-
The use of stories and storytelling helps us learn and remember the past it’s the way our human ancestors handed down stories for this reason.
-
The personalised story of each storyteller is part of their unique DNA profile and, as such, cannot be owned by any other person or corporation.
-
Understanding our legacy in our lifetime helps families and communities understand where they come from and helps anchor humans in society to be a useful part of a knowledge bank worthy of passing on.
-
When we stop ignoring critical problems that affect our society and vote as a collective community, the World will bea better place.
About Geraldine O'Brien:
Interior Architect and grandmother still seeking new ways to use my experience.
Contacting Geraldine O'Brien:
You can contact Geraldine by email
By Geraldine O’Brien
Anthropology and Archeology are ways we study the earth’s inhabitants and their lives, past and present. We have lost the voices of past generations. Individual word-of-mouth, image stories etc.
These stories are around for a couple of generations and then they sadly disappear.
We are losing know-how and other irretrievable human knowledge that has been discovered and lost over time.
Our lives and how we live them are unique to each person.
These stories make up the social history of our time. They reflect our identity, our relationships, our family history legacies and our social data.
We need a better way to capture them for the future.
Stories have to be told, or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are and why we are here Sue Monk Kidd’s Secret Life of Bees.
The work experience that stood out for me in my design life was working for Magdalene Women.
The interior job was to rehome an ageing community of Catholic Nuns and a community of Magdalene Women (girls) who were still in the care of the nuns long after the Industrial Laundry closed.
The old convent, school and laundry buildings were being sold to Dublin City Council for redevelopment as the community had no further use for them.
A new home was to be built for both nuns and women.
I felt privileged to see first-hand how both communities lived and experienced how the new building changed their lives for the better.
Each girl had a profound story to tell me, and my empathy for the girls made me fight for them. The nuns had taken vows of poverty and dedicated their lives of prayer when they joined the convent. Devoting their lives to God.
Some of the girls didn’t seem to understand questions I asked of them? Having obtained permission to talk to both nuns and girls.
They were equally my clients and I needed to understand each client’s needs.
“You know you are moving to your new home with your “own” room?
Was as far as I got before they replied
“The reason I’m here”.
Followed by how and why are they still found themselves confined to a Magdalene Laundry.
Not fully understanding at the time, that they had been traumatised by their laundry experience and had been ostracised from their family and communities. I felt unable to lift their spirits.
I reflecting long after, why they answered in that precise way.
What they needed most was a clarification to know that they did exist in this World.
That the stories they each told me were real.
Perhaps they were afraid they might forget, if they didn’t tell their story to anyone who would listen to them.
Many years later, a thought struck me, what the traumatised girls wanted most was a Living Legacy of each of their stories.
These stories resonated with me perhaps because of my interest in Storytelling.
I found each of their stories believable and memorable.
What they asked me for on that day was a way to be heard and not forgotten.
Those brave Magdalene women left their life imprint on me that day.
Those stories stayed with me for a long time, and the feeling I had missed solving the something yet to understood. Realising they had PTSD, remained untreated in their lifetime.
The Magadelane Women were the genesis for building a prototype and business plan for a Digital Story Archive.
My idea was to give people a simple, fun way to capture and store their stories safely for the future.
Simple but not in practice. My prolonged search for funding for a non-profit business model such as this was not to be found at the time.
Holding out hope, that one day I can add my findings to such an archive.
The more I look at this problem, the more it is clear to me that.
Humans need a safe way to leave a Living Legacy to understand and live a fulfilled life.
Doing so has health and educational benefits for society.
I continue to find research to back up my theory.
I attended an open day at The National Library of Ireland for Europeana. The Digital European Archive supported by the European Union.
To have a better understanding of what prompted people to attend, events such as this.
Europeana wanted to digitise and collect some personal stories from WW11 for the Archive.
Six hundred people attended that day, the largest attendance in all the British Isles.
One lady told me a story about her brother, who had joined the British Army.
How when he returned home, He found his wife had remarried.
She had been informed, he had died on the battlefield. She had remarried and had children with her new partner.
Finding himself now homeless, with no chance of getting work in a post-war Ireland.
Being stigmatised by his community for fighting for Britain.
He did marry again, his second wife was a school teacher, and she supported and cared for him.
He fought depression and PTSD for the rest of his life.
As She was now the only member left of that family. Her brothers ration book was her only rememberance of his life.
Meeting a Father and Son who came to have their Father and Grandfather remembered.
He had been decorated, and several books recounted his courageous feats of saving his regiment, He sadly died on the battlefield. The family had his uniform, helmet and other memorabilia,
As His was a more provable story, Europeana digitised their story that day.
The many others attendees with stories that day were not so fortunate.
Dr Jonny Walker Having trained as a radiologist in Australia and worked as a Flying Doctor in the Outback with the Aboriginal communities.
He since moved to Ireland. and now practices in Dublin.
He talks about his work experience with that communty and how impactful they were on his life. He mentioned in passing at a talk that I attended.
“The word to ostracise or to be ostracise comes from Aboriginal culture” He said.
When the elders vote to eject a person for a misdeed in their community.
“That person was shown The Bone”. The meaning was clear that they no longer belonged to the community. Without a community to belong to, was a certain death sentence in the Outback.
My last story is about a homeless agency that published a coffee table book to publicise their agency and service.
One of the stories in the book was about one of their residents.
Who, when shown his picture next to his story, ran away shouting, “I am real, and I am alive”. Similarities between the Magadelane Woman and the homeless man.
Feeling they had both been ostracised from families and community and they didn’t believe they existed.
