Today is my 55th birthday and I’ve chosen this day to become a time traveler, learning more about my family’s past and preserving the stories for future generations using the web-based tools available to each of us.

Social media provides a range of applications that enable the techie and non-techie among us to preserve the holiday dinner stories—to keep those stories alive for generations that have yet to be conceived. Social media gives us tools to share the pictures of births, graduations, weddings and the day-to-day events that make up our collective history.

I’ve been thinking about and drafting parts of this project for months and I’ve learned a lot. Among my revelations: I have little or no idea exactly when or how my parents met, or how my grandmother survived as a single mother of five children in the 1940s and 50s. I’ve come to realize that half of my generation is too young to remember our great-grandfather, Archie L. Parrish, a coal miner and inventor who lived to the ripe age of 99 years and 9 months. I realize that the next generation knows nothing about him except what they hear in stories told at family gatherings.

I hope to change that, not only for my family, but for my friends’ families and the families of folks I may never meet. I’m not setting out to write History 101, the stories of the few hundred folks who’ve made it into the books that fill our libraries and that we hear about from Kindergarten through graduate school.

My goal, through this blog and links to other social media applications and resources, will be to better understand my family’s history and to help everyone who’s willing to learn—and share—theirs. I hope you’ll join me.