Weaving a Legacy: the Reasons to Start a Family Heirloom

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If you are a family that sits looking on your devices, you’re not alone. It’s something that we’ve all fallen into, but if the idea of family time needs shaking up in your household you may benefit from starting a family heirloom. It’s something that brings so many benefits into a household, but what are these and what types of heirlooms can we create?

You Create a Legacy

Many heirlooms are passed down from generation to generation over hundreds of years, and a legacy like an heirloom is an amazing way to ensure that you leave your mark on the world before you pass on. Heirlooms can typically take the form of jewelry, but we can start creating our own family heirlooms, for example, a quilt with every family member’s story sewn onto it. This is the perfect opportunity for everybody to not just think about what massive they would like to pass on to future generations but it is a perfect opportunity to start perfecting quilting techniques or, very simply, learning how to knit or sew. When it comes to creating a legacy, an heirloom is an excellent opportunity to make sure that you have a message for your future generations and that it lives on.

It Connects You to Past Generations

If you’ve already got an heirloom in the household, you can see the story of your family unfold. More than ever, people want to learn about their family history and spend a lot of money on DNA kits and ancestry resources, but another simple way to learn about your family’s history is to study the heirlooms that have been passed down. It may not instantly tell a story, especially if it’s an item of jewelry, but you can start to look at the time period of that piece of jewelry and conduct your own research.

It Provides a Time Capsule

We can easily get distracted by what’s important right now, but a family heirloom like starting your own family cookbook and adding to it can be an amazing way for you to bond with the family, make wonderful meals, but it also gives future generations an insight into the foods that were popular. It’s interesting to look back over the history of food over the last 100 years and how things have changed. While once upon a time, fat became demonized, but now it’s become accepted again, and it’s amazing to commit these things to something like a handwritten recipe book, especially as everything is digital these days.

It Starts a Conversation

Starting an heirloom or looking at one that is already in the family is an amazing conversation starter. People that don’t collect heirlooms are always interested in something that has a massive legacy. Because an heirloom puts you into a specific time period and it makes you think about what has happened to that heirloom over the hundreds of years, it’s an amazing way to keep the memory of older relatives alive, but it can also inspire your children to start collecting or making heirlooms of their own.