Photo by Andrew Neel
What is a Genesis Story?*
A Genesis story is a story of a beginning, but not necessarily the beginning. It’s a good place to start a history because there are so many beginnings in your life:
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- Your first day of elementary school
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- The day you met your best high school friend
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- The first time you glimpsed your significant other
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- Your first date with your significant other
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- Your first job
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- The first time you ended up in the hospital
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- The birth of your first child
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- Your first attempt at your favorite hobby
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- Your first trip to the dentist
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- The day you had an idea for a business you could start
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- What happened the day you left home for the first time
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- The day you learned to read
Do you have any great memories of the first day of school? There’s a genesis story in the making…
Here’s a fun Genesis Story told by Cay Roberts and her husband, Kirk about the beginning of their family. These stories were recorded using the Zoom videoconferencing app, so the audio and video quality are not as clear as they would be if we had been filming in person. Still, the story is a precious one, and it was a lot of fun to get two different perspectives of the same story and then juxtapose the two versions as a single Genesis Story Legacy Video:
Genesis Stories tend to be stories you tell over and over, but maybe you have a great Genesis Story you have never shared. You probably already have a couple of Genesis Stories you are already good at telling. Start with one of those.
Just turn on a voice recording app on your smartphone, or set your phone on a tripod and record a video. It’s also just fine to sit down with a paper and pencil and start writing down your memory of a new beginning. Try it! Once you have done this much, it will be easier to keep going. And once you finish, you can move on to Lesson 3: Remembering With Photos.
*I am indebted to Rhonda Lauritzen at Evalogue.life who taught me the magic of a Genesis Story. Rhonda teaches professional oral history interviewing skills.
You can sit in on my very first Zoom class held in March 2024 with a few friends who are working together to write and publish Personal Histories for ourselves and our family members. We talk about Genesis Stories, and you’ll hear some of the stories we recorded for our own histories.
