The Relative Pages

We are friends with our relatives—and we owe much of our closeness to our family directory. It helps us to be more aware of our extended family and makes it easy for us to contact one another on special days.

On one side of our directory we list the birthdays and wedding anniversaries of all my grandparents’ descendants, along with their spouses—now consisting of three generations. We note the year of birth of all children (so we can keep up with how fast they are growing), and when more than one family shares a surname, we list the initials of the parents’ first names after the child’s year of birth. On the other side of the directory, we list phone numbers and addresses of all adult family members.

We print the directory, double-sided, on colored card stock for durability and “findability,” and distribute it to all adult family members. Several of us also make a reduced copy for our planning books or purses. One aunt who is never without her directory says it has saved her more than once when she has been out of town and needed a family member’s phone number or address.

It took some effort initially to gather the information for our directory. But now we just have to keep track of births, marriages, deaths, and address changes that have occurred since our last printing, then make the necessary corrections before we print a new edition.—Jo Ellen Ashworth, Salt Lake City, Utah

Photography by John Luke