Someday one of my descendants is going to come looking for me. They will type my name into whatever a search engine looks like by then, and if I have done my job, they will find this. Not a headstone. Not one cramped line in a parish register. One ordinary day, an unremarkable Tuesday, in my own words.
I have spent years trying to reconstruct the days of people who left me almost nothing, so this week I am flipping it around. I am writing my day down on purpose, while I still can.
Fair warning: it is not a dramatic day. It is an ordinary day, and that is sort of the point.
7:15 a.m.
The alarm goes at 7:15 on a weekday, and the first thing I reach for is not my to-do list. It is my LinkedIn games. Coffee in one hand, little puzzles in the other, before I let the day get its hands on me. It is a silly ritual and I am not giving it up.
My ancestors did not have a phone to poke at, obviously, but I would bet more than a few of them stole the same quiet minute with a hot drink before the real work started. The difference is what “real work” meant. For a woman on a Swedish farm or in a Carpatho-Rusyn village, the day did not start at a time she picked. It started when the animals needed her and when there was enough light to see by. Somebody had to wake the fire back up. Water came from a well, not a faucet. Bread did not show up in a bag on the counter.
Me? Thirty minutes to shower and get dressed, and I am parked in front of my computer by 8:15. That whole sentence would have baffled them.
8:15 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., the job that pays the bills
For most of the daylight I am a Legal Entity Governance Specialist. I handle corporate governance for all of General Electric Company’s subsidiaries in the U.S. and Canada. Some days that means standing up a brand new subsidiary. Some days it means dissolving one, or merging two or three of them into one. I draft the documents that appoint directors and officers, I write Powers of Attorney and Delegations of Signature Authority, and I file the annual reports that keep every entity in good standing.
Underneath the daily stuff there are always a few bigger things going on. Right now I am building a SharePoint site so my global team’s information finally lives in one place instead of scattered everywhere. I am also cleaning up my templates, the appointment documents, bylaws, and LLC agreements, and I will say it plainly: Harvey.ai has been a huge help. I am training our directors and officers, the new ones and the ones who have been around, on what they actually owe to the subsidiary they got appointed to. And meetings. So, so many meetings. This is the part I lovingly call my “pesky job that pays the bills.”
The strange part is that almost nothing I make all day is something you could actually hold. I create and end entire legal entities that only exist on paper and in a database. I move authority from one person to another with a signature. My great-grandmothers would not have known what to do with a single hour of it. Their work fed people and kept a household alive through the winter. You could see it, and touch it, and eat it.
The distances are strange too. A merger I am running might tie together companies in two countries, and I handle the whole thing from my home office in an afternoon. My great-grandmothers would not have understood a “home office” either, since their home office was the entire home. I close whole chapters of a company’s history before lunch. A letter across the Atlantic, in their day, could take weeks, assuming it arrived at all.
After 5:00, the part I actually chose
Around five I finally log off, and honestly this second shift is the one my descendant is going to care about.
A lot of evenings are ordinary in the nicest way. I get dinner going before my husband gets home, or, if work chewed me up that day, I make the call to just order out. Then it is the two of us and whatever we have decided to watch. My ancestors would recognize this part in a heartbeat. Dinner, your person, a little quiet at the end of a long day. Some things really do not change in a hundred years, and thank goodness for that.
The other evenings are when he is working late, or when we have both had it with the TV. That is when I stop being a governance specialist and go back to being a genealogist. Lately that is coursework for the National Genealogical Society’s Advanced Skills in Genealogy program, or my own research down whatever rabbit hole grabbed me that week, or, more than anything right now, my Master Trip Plan. I will tell you all about that trip in a later post.
My ancestors did their own family history too, in a way. They just did it in their heads. They knew who was cousin to whom, who had gone to America, who died young, who married into which family, and they carried all of it around and handed it down out loud at the kitchen table. Then the people holding those memories died, and most of it went with them. That is the exact silence I spend my evenings trying to fill.
So I am doing the same thing they did, remembering our family, except I get to write it down and prove it and pass it forward on purpose. They kept our family alive by living it. I keep it by documenting it. The tools could not be more different. The reason is the same: to keep the family from disappearing.
For whoever finds this
That is my ordinary day. Games and coffee, a day of building and taking apart things that only live on paper, dinner with my husband, and a quiet evening bent over the records of people who never once imagined me.
If you are the one who found this someday, here is what I hope you take from it. I lived a regular life, and I chose to leave you the small stuff on purpose, because I know exactly how much I would give for one ordinary day from any of the people who came before me. I could not get their days back. So you get mine instead.
Go easy on us. We were doing the best we could with what we had, same as you will be.
Your Turn!
Why should I document my own ordinary day for genealogy? Because the everyday details you take for granted are exactly what your descendants will have no other way to recover.
How do I start recording my daily life for family history? Pick one ordinary day and write it down plainly, hour by hour, including the small rituals. Save it where family will find it.
What is the 52 Ancestors “A Day in the Life” prompt? A weekly writing challenge prompt encouraging genealogists to explore an ancestor’s daily life, or their own. Check it out at: https://www.amyjohnsoncrow.com/52-ancestors-in-52-weeks-new/
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