How Writing a Legacy Book Impacted the Writer’s Life: Q & A with Donna Branch

Note: Today’s guest post comes from my friend Donna Branch. I met her at our church’s woman’s social event and felt a connection. Eventually, I reached out to her, and we became friends. She’s one of the most active people I know. She is a HR director for a local company, runs a non-profit called Three to the Third, and heads a book project that’s the subject of today’s guest post. She’s one of the most inspiring people I know because she’s so open to bettering herself and the world around her! Enjoy this Q & A with Donna Branch about writing a legacy book for your family.

Question: Please describe this enterprising book project, Where We Belong.

Donna: We didn’t know it at the time, but the vision for the Where We Belong legacy book actually started when my mom was experiencing depression in early 2013 after retiring from being a psychiatric nurse. During her career, she loved helping patients that struggled with mental illness. She showed them great compassion and understanding when others didn’t know how to help them. She was an amazing nurse with great empathy and understanding for what they were dealing with. Her strong desire to help others gave her a purpose for getting up each morning. After her retirement, our family tried various health professionals to help Mom deal with the loss and sadness she felt. 

When I visited her during various hospital stays, I started asking questions about her childhood and life in Germany before my family moved to the United States when I was just five years old. I started gaining new perspectives about her family experiences with an alcoholic father that gave me an understanding of her courage and perseverance. 

Over the next several years, I felt God prompting me to pray with my mom instead of just for her. I wanted her to hear me express my love for her and my deep desire for God to give her peace and joy. She was feeling forsaken by God, but reluctantly let me pray with her. 

Those hospital conversations with Mom sparked a desire in me to make sure our family legacy stories were preserved so my children and grandchildren could understand the courage and strength that was passed on to them. That lesson was one that I needed to learn too.

Later, I began asking my mom and dad questions together about their childhoods. They enjoyed sharing their experiences with me and I learned so much. When I asked about their first childhood memories, I was surprised that they both remembered going underground for safety when they were four years old. They were both born in 1940, so their first childhood memories could have been about the same time.   

Mom was in Nuernberg, Germany with her mother going into a basement to escape overhead bombers during WWII in Nazi Germany and Dad was in Mannford, Oklahoma going into a cellar to escape a tornado with his mother. Hearing that they shared very similar first memories connected them with each other unexpectedly and gave me a deeper understanding of things that my parents lived through. Gaining an understanding of their experiences brought us closer…..it was amazing what a few simple questions could do – it showed them reverence and was healing for me!

The process of asking legacy questions to family members won’t just impact you in a positive way, it will bless your family members. They will feel honored to share their stories. The vision for Where We Belong was inspired by those early interviews with my mom. Her life helped form the vision of creating family legacy stories in a way that encourages understanding and healing. I used to think those experiences were Mom’s story, but I realized through answering these questions for Mother’s Day, that it is “our” story.

In 2018, we started a small pilot group of writers and non-writers that met regularly to encourage each other to write a family legacy book called Where We Belong (WWB).   

We hosted weekly meetings to help inspire novices like me and also for accountability to help us get our writing done. Some of us would type a chapter and some would call family members to interview them for our book. The facilitators of the group except for me were experienced writers who could give writing advice, help with editing and formatting, and contribute to creating a Where We Belong prototype book.

We wanted to learn the best way to help people keep progressing and writing without feeling burdened or frustrated. Our time together was fun, but also productive.

As we come upon Mother’s Day in 2020, it is with overwhelming gratitude that I can anticipate that our visit with my mom and dad this year will include laughter and joyfulness. Mom is calling to check on us (my brother, sister, and me) frequently and reminds us when it’s time for another visit. We sit very far apart from each other in their turquoise Adirondack chairs on their property because we’re still social distancing to keep them safe.

For a while, we will continue to keep our distance during our COVID-19 pandemic visits, but we can look forward to those precious times together. I like to remind Mom about the signs that God provided on their beautiful property just a few years ago when her healing began. God was showing us during difficult times, our prayers were bearing fruit. 

As we laugh together now and remember His amazing grace, we both know those special prayers for her (and with her) were answered. Our Great Physician never abandoned her and restored our family.

Happy Mother’s Day Mom, you are courageous, compassionate, beautiful, and greatly loved!

Question: What’s the structure of your book?

Donna: The Where We Belong (WWB) coffee table book was designed with a standard format to make it easy for non-writers like me to progress through writing our family stories in a way that takes the guesswork and anxiousness out of formatting it. 

Another reason for designing the Where We Belong book with a standard size and design cover was to make it recognizable when you see another Where We Belong book in someone else’s home.

The prototype of the Where We Belong coffee table book was designed with seven chapters and about sixteen pages per chapter. The length of each chapter is flexible. You can borrow pages from a shorter chapter to use in a chapter that you want to make longer. The prototype had a total of 112 pages and will be a 5×7 hard-backed book. 

The titles of each chapter are named in a way that gives you the option to include your family of origin, but also close friends and influential people that impacted you and your family in a positive way. 

They are:

• Chapter 1-LEGACY (older generation family/friends are interviewed first).
• Chapter 2-HER (females that influenced our life – who we are).
• Chapter 3-HIM (the men in our lives-families, friends, coaches, etc.).
• Chapter 4-STORY TIME (a fun story to pass down to children).
• Chapter 5-US (cousins, friends, spouse, etc.).
• Chapter 6-SELF/ME (self-actualization).
• Chapter 7-FUTURE (Esteem, needs, safety, healing, how the future will look now).

The Where We Belong coffee-table book is not published to sell, but intended as gifts for your family to display on their own coffee tables, so they can enjoy and continue sharing the legacy stories through the generations. The Story Time chapter is included to read to children throughout future generations. The stories should be fun, but also have a lesson. They can be a family story or something fictional and creative.

Interviewing family members helped jumpstart me to write when I really didn’t know how to start. I realized that if interviewing my parents would help strengthen our relationships, that it could help others too.

The main vision for the Where We Belong book is not necessarily to create a book. The primary goal is to help you understand your family’s experiences in a deeper way, to learn what your older generations experienced, what made them who they are, to write and memorialize the positive experiences and legacy that they passed down to us. Those insights can heal past wounds and even restore relationships. Interviewing family members can be a therapeutic process where you gain empathy and insight. It helps us understand and appreciate the legacy we came from and helps determine the legacy we want to leave – the FUTURE.

Question: Did you interview many family members and how did those interviews go?

Donna: Yes, I interviewed my mother and dad, and an older cousin in New Orleans who shared many stories of her time with my mom in Germany before I was born. 

It was fascinating to hear about my mom’s life through my cousin’s memories and the love and respect that she had for my mom. It was amazing to hear some of the things that my mom lived through, things that she never shared with me until I asked.

Question: Did you self-publish the book?

Donna: We haven’t printed or published the prototype book that we created yet, but will. My goal is to have it formally edited and printed before we start a new group of Where We Belong writers. We will offer a lunchtime session with employees in the workplace who want to create their own legacy books. We’ll use the printed sample book to give people a visual of what their coffee-table book will look like.

Question: Any other tips for anyone who wants to write a short book of memories for their mother or grandmother?

Donna: Yes, take every opportunity to ask your mom and grandmothers questions about their life experiences whenever you’re with them and record their answers. Let them share the same stories over and over with you until you have them in your memory and make sure they’re documented somewhere. It is such an honoring thing to do with them, but also critical to learn and preserve your family legacy. You will be amazed at what you learn and what you discover about yourself through this process. It is powerful.

 

 

 

(The book cover is a mockup and not the final product. Actually, the turquoise cover is Donna’s front door.)

If you’re interested in launching your own Where We Belong legacy book, please email her to connect.