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Why Sharing Family History With Children is Crucial · 5–Minute Parenting: Tips to Help You Raise Competent, Godly Kids.

• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to another episode of Five Minute Parenting.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Today I have a special guest, Angela Bragenbach.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: She is going to share something very unique with us today: why sharing family history with children is crucial.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: And she is the executive director for the International Institute of Genealogical Studies.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: And she helps people become professional genealogists and gain their dream career.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: Not only that, she's a best-selling author of historical fiction, and her stories capture true history while she uses her skills as a professional genealogist to weave in the people, place, and time to bring the past to life.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: Angie is a passionate storyteller educator, preserving the past for future generations.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: And she has a six-book series, Queen of the Rockies, which you can find on her website.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: So be sure to check out the show notes for this podcast.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome, Angie.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for being on as our guest.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: I really appreciate your invitation and the chance to uh just really talk to parents about uh sharing what they know with their children.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's important.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: So uh what I've learned going through the professional genealogy, you know, track, if you want to call it that, the changing careers or adding on to a career from being an author and a speaker is that most people, when they want to be a professional genealogist, want to learn their stories.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: They want to know who they are, they want to know why the people did what they did in the background in the in the um generations before them.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: And they they want to know if there's somebody famous, they want to know um maybe who their parents are or their grandparents.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I worked for a particular client to find out whether or not uh one of the grandparents in the lineage was really a grandparent.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: And we discovered that they likely were not.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: And what that meant was that it changed a whole lot of other dynamics within the family.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where we come to the important part of sharing your family history with your children.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's crucial that we find out and share that history whether or not they are heroic tales, whether or not they're famous tales, or whether or not they might actually be cautionary tales.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I've used all of those in my own family, not only with my children, but now with my grandchildren.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: And a few things that have come out of that have been pretty fun and fascinating, and sometimes a little bit um, I don't want to say sad, but something that stops you for a moment and makes you think, who do I want to be?
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: What do I want to do with my life?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Do I want to continue that pattern, or do I want to make a different pattern?
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's very biblical, by the way, because in the Bible it talks about that you can bless up to a thousand, sorry, not you, but your behavior and your um obedience to the Lord, your love of the Lord can bless up to a thousand generations after you, your disobedience to the Lord can cause problems for up to three to four generations after you.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: So if you think about divorce, if you think that is in one particular line in my own family, there was quite a few divorces.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it comes to a point where you have to say, enough is enough.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to go with the societal norm.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I was unfortunately a part of that lineage, and I didn't realize that in my own faith process until it was too late.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I made decisions too early in my life, that um there wasn't a lot of protective things around me to stop me from making decisions that would cause problems later in my life.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's really important that when we are parents and grandparents, that, and even great-grandparents, because in our family, we're lucky enough that um quite a few of our great-grandparents were around for a number of years for the great-grandchildren.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: And we would ask them questions during family get-togethers so that they would share some of their stories with their great-grandchildren, their grandchildren, and their children.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: One of those stories um was really fascinating because my husband didn't like his middle name.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: He thought that he was named after an ant that wasn't not only not a favorite, but didn't come across as kind and treated him unkindly.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of those things bothered him all of his life.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: And he thought his middle name was named after that.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, in his family lineage, and I'm not speaking to any particular, you know, religion or whatever, uh, but particularly in his family, they followed the Catholic religion.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: And his mom, unbeknownst to him, had lost a child right before he uh she got pregnant with him.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: And she was so concerned about her losing another child that she was praying about it.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: And she found out that a particular saint was the saint of pregnant women and newborn infants.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so when he was born, she didn't name him after a male version of the aunt's name, she named him after Saint Gerard because she was so thankful to God that he had protected her pregnancy and the birth of that child.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: So, what I'm telling you about the family history of that is it changed my husband's thinking, it changed his way of being about his own name.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: And suddenly he was proud of the name he carried because it showed not that his mom was, you know, praying to a saint or anything like that.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: She didn't do that.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: She, but it showed that she cared enough that he was born.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Do you see?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: So some of those stories are pretty astonishing when you actually learn them and it changes your own impression of who you are or who you're belonging to.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of people want to know uh who their people are, if you will.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter what race or creed or anything like that, but they want to know how they came to be.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Who am I?
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: And especially this is a big deal in the in the junior high and the teen years when they're trying to find their own identity.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this came to play in another story for my own grandchildren.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I've got um 11 grandchildren, but of those, a couple of them live close, and they were they've been trying out, you know, different sports through their younger years.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: So when they were little, I was doing genealogy.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: You all know, professional genealogists, and I was trying to find some answers for another um cousin of mine, and they said, and I'm gonna tell two stories off this, if you don't mind.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: This is fascinating.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: This is why we tell them.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: We fascinate our children and our families, and it and it's this this sense of community that we give them.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: God gave us community.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: So the story that is the, I guess, hero tale from our family is that uh my little grandsons were sitting on the sofa, and I, when they came in, um, they plopped down beside me, and I had a lot of kind of like newspaper books and uh newspapers that were in photo books and things like this that I was collecting and things I printed off the internet about a man named Um Lynn Nelson.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Lynn Nelson uh was a uh Major League Baseball player back in the 30s and 40s.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what happened in the 30s and 40s, uh 1930s and 40s, I should say, was World War II.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of those um baseball players, a lot of those young men, regardless of what they did for a living, were um drafted into the military.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Lynn was drafted into the military.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: And Lynn survived and he came back, but not only did he come back, but he then became not just a professional baseball player, he became a professional boxer.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: What?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, you know, and then you start doing a little bit of research, and I'll tell you where that came from in a minute.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then he decided to go back into professional baseball.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: So he played for a couple of different major league teams.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now there's been more than one Lynn Nelson, obviously, it's a pretty common name in um in the world, but it's a both male or female name as well, common.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: And what he ended up doing, besides going to fight in World War II, was doing Major League Baseball for different teams and professional boxing.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: But it inspired my grandsons because they were trying baseball at the time.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now, let me tell you, my grandson, who's now in high school, was the main impetus for getting baseball back in high school in Missoula County last year.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it was because he had been inspired by Lynn Nelson's story that it was in his DNA, right?
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's just who he is, it's what he belongs to.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's a talent that runs through the DNA of our family.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: So how inspiring is that?
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: A World War II hero who's been a professional boxer and a professional baseball player, that man did hard things.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: So when my grandson was told, no, you can't play baseball in high school when you're done with Little League, you're just done.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: And he's like, that was not good enough for me.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: So he got together a bunch of people to sign petitions and they took it to the school board and it got on the news and it got in the newspaper and everything.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: And the school board agreed to reinstate baseball, which has been gone for a long time from uh Missoula and from Montana.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: But in addition to that, um, with his communications with other kids in Billings, we're in Missoula.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now Billings has got baseball too.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: And now they have teams that are growing around the state of Montana.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: And this is, you know, almost what is it, 80 years later from this.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: And you think about it, it's like had he not known that story, he wouldn't have been inspired to do hard things.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: So, parents, please inspire your children and grandchildren and even great-grandchildren to do hard things.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's really important that they hear those tales.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: You ready for another tale then?
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so the cautionary tale.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I will tell you that I waited to tell this story out of respect because the family who asked me to do the research asked me to wait until the last person that could be emotionally affected by this passed away.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: And um, she did, and I did, I did love her.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: She was uh cousin, and uh in my family, my grandfather was born in 1883.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: I was born in 1964, so he turned 81 right after I was born.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's another long span of time.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: He went from covered wagons uh to cars to when I was five, we both watched the man land on the moon in 1969, and that was just spectacular.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: But his brother got into trouble.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: And his brother had uh a wife and a child, and he fell in love or lust, whichever you want to say.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is when we follow the things that we should not be following of the world, and this cautionary tale really destroyed a lot of people's lives, but but there's redemption at the end, so go with me.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: So this man, his name was George, and George um had a wife and a young daughter, and they moved to a community, and in that community, he took over managing asilo.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And this is in uh 19 early 1900s, 1900 through 1902.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: George decided to take up with his boss's daughter, and he couldn't quite afford um caring for his home with his wife and daughter and his mistress, who was also very involved in the situation.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: She was definitely not taken advantage of.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: But what happened was he set her up in another house and he couldn't afford it.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: So he embezzled from his boss, who happened to be her father in a small community.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I have to go back and look, but I know it was definitely less than 10,000.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: It might have been about 4,000 people.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you're in a small town like that, you might notice someone taking up with someone else.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: You might notice in your small business granaries that money is missing.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: And when they tracked it down, it turned out he was George.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: So he ended up, and the newspapers carried this all over the country.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: It became national scandal.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: And this was my great uncle.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so he decided to go on the lamb, and that is exactly how they describe it in the newspapers.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: But in the newspapers, they transposed his initials, and so his name was G.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: E.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Nelson, and in the first new pay newspaper started printing it as E.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: G.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Nelson.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: So when the family was like, Hey, you know, we've got all of his um genealogy stuff up to 1902, and then he just like disappears.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Hey, Angie, can you help us find this?
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I went, Oh, okay.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I started looking and I had the story within two hours.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: And because of that transposing of initials.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: But when he was caught, he was caught by uh the second detective.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: The first detective went and was having fun and just stayed three weeks in the little town, said he couldn't find anything in that village to tell what was going on.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: The second detective took over and he found stuff, of course, right away.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: He found the jilted lover, and she gave him the love letters that were coming while George was on the lamb.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: George had taken the train all over Middle America, and eventually, when he knew he was going to be caught, he went back to his father-in-law's house where his wife and daughter had gone, was trying to beg his wife to come back to him because then she couldn't testify against him in the court of law.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: The detective showed up.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: He said he never even had to handcuff him.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: He was a gentleman criminal criminal who was exceedingly handsome and charming.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you see, some of these problems come in when we rely too much on what we want ourselves and what we look like and what we think we're entitled to.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: And by telling one of these cautionary tales, we help our children overcome uh what might be an entitlement or what might be tripping them up with what they desire versus what is right and good.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: So telling a cautionary tale is not something you should hide.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: It is something you should tell what is the outcome.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now I want you to know that George did go to penitentiary and he destroyed his entire family's livelihoods in the state because while he was going through this, the newspapers have always loved a scandal.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: My great-grandfather's business was on one side of the page and the newspaper, and they would always put the articles about George for the next six months or more right next to my great-grandfather's business articles.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it created such a scandal that he he lost his business and the embarrassment to the whole family.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: So they ended up moving from um the state of Iowa to the state of Minnesota.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: And because I at that time, my grandfather being born in 1883 was um just just about 20, um, he went with his family and moved to Minnesota, where he ended up meeting um his first wife, which was my grandmother's cousin, who unfortunately passed away from the Spanish flu without children.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then he married her cousin, my grandma.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: And they had quite a history there.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing, right?
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: So when you start to tell those stories, you can tell about what royalty you may or may not be related to.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: That is not the reason for genealogy.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: Genealogy brings us together for a sense of belonging, a sense of community, a sense of understanding.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: And when we understand that we're related to basically everybody around the world, it also helps us get rid of racism.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, and it helps us get rid of um a sense of entitlement, and it helps us understand that we belong in community with one another, and it helps us find our place in the world.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: It also helps us find our own talents and abilities.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I found out I'm a writer, my grandfather was a writer, he wrote poetry, he was a singer, a musician, and he called himself a speaker in the method.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: He really was an ordained minister.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't even know that.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: He never told us.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like now one of my sons is a minister, one of my sons is a music teacher.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: I sing and I write professionally and I teach professionally.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: All of these talents coming down through the DNA, and nobody even told us all those things.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: But as I started to discover them, it started, you know, clicking off light bulbs.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think you amazing insights.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, my mother was when she was alive, she was really into genealogy.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: She did research, she even traveled to different places, and she created a really thick book for my sister and I.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I just realizing I know a lot about my family, but I need to get back into that book that she labored over and put so much love into.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's on a shelf, and I just think, you know, thank you, mom, because there's a lot there.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: I agree.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: I took my grandfather's and my grandmother's um autobiographies that they wrote, and I've been compiling them into a family book, and I want to do that with George, and I want to do that with um Lynn and a lot of other people, but I also want to add the photos and the lamp so that people can go visit.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: We went to Scotland and uh for my daughter ended up, this is another just uh sort of an anecdotal aside, but I believe your blood sings to you.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: I believe your DNA is deep within you.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And if you go back to Leviticus, you'll see why.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: In in Leviticus, where God is designating the Levites as the preachers and designates part of them as the singers and the musicians, and he designates other um family lines or tribal communities as the builders and the bronze and the gold and the others with the the dying of the fabric and the artisans.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: He actually designated families to do that.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: And if you look through your family line, you're going to find, even if you didn't know it, that there is a continual through that family line set of talents and abilities.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: And if you know that, you can lean into it.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't, you might flail for a long time trying to find out what you're supposed to do with your life.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: So this is another way you can help your children.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: Lean into that book she did and then share.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for sharing with us such interesting information and encouragement.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: And oh, thank you so much.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I encourage our readers to go to your website and check out your books, and I'm sure you have a lot of other great things on that website.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I thank you so much.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for being with us.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's been my pleasure.