In my family I am known as the family historian. Every family has one. You know, that one relative who knows the old family stories, tramps around old cemeteries and takes pictures of absolutely everyone at family reunions. My grandfather loved to talk and to tell stories of his childhood and lifes experiences and I hung on every word. Born in 1909 he had a full and active life that to me as a young boy was absolutely amazing. The hours spent fishing and talking with him opened up a whole world of wonder to me. One where there were few if any cars. Where one owned two pairs of overalls, one for Sundays and the other for "everyday". Of one room schoolhouses and three times losing his childhood home to fire. Tales of the Spanish flu, the great depression, and songs of defeating the Kaiser.

Oral history has always played a major part in the culture of people throughout history. It was the glue that gave identity and provided common heritage to family, clans, tribes, and even entire nations. Unfortunately, in our modern society, we have lost sight of the importance of family history and the positive role it can play. As I grew older I realized how many of the stories I was told were actually family stories passed from one generation to another. A thread of blood and family weaving its way through time. My grandfathers cousin who described the filth and slaughter in the trenches of World War I. My great-grandfather, the Nebraska sand hills farmer later turned preacher, who raised his five boys to be excellent shots and famous coyote hunters. His father Hank Harris, the first sheriff of Rock county, Nebraska, who once walked fifty miles in a day to stake out his homestead. He was a skilled marksman who was shot twice in a shoot-out with a horsethief before killing his assailant and then riding twenty miles with a bullet in him to deliver the other member of the gang to justice. Of his meeting Buffalo Bill Cody and helping to talk a native chief from leading his warriors on the warpath. His father fought with the Grand Army of the Republic and his cousins lived on leaves and rats while in Confederate prison camps. The stories go on and on.

Every family has a rich and varied history. Of triumph and tragedy. Its own heroes and villains. But we are a part of that. The final product of those who came before us. As a pallbearer this summer for my grandmother I helped carry her casket across what had once been her fathers fields to its final resting-place just a few hundred yards from where she was born. I was surrounded by the graves of relatives who had gone on before and dozens of their descendants so often scattered and near-strangers but brought together for an event such as that. There was a shared camaraderie though of family, and the ghosts, dreams and aspirations of those who exist only in a few faded photos and in old stories from long ago.

Fifty years from now I hope to be surrounded by my grandchildren and great-grandchildren as I ply them with stories of how things once were. Of the birth of the Internet, the rotary phone, of party lines and the era before TV remote controls. I will tell them about the space shuttle Challenger, the Gulf War and the terrible events of September 11th. These things will as seem as wondrous to them as the Model T and sod houses did to me as I sat on Granddads knee and as long ago as World War I and the Depression did to me. There will be a spark in at least one of their eyes that will tell me that they want to hear more, to flip through the old albums and hear about those staring back at them from generations before. And one of them will become the family historian and carry on my passion and the proud legacy that was handed down to me so long ago.