Our Story
“Everything I have done has been to do with people and communication - I’ve never discriminated. I’ve known people of all walks of life.”
The idea for the project came about on a nature walk with my grandma. I have always been close to her and learned a lot from her throughout my life. She told me stories about her own experiences and commented that she would have loved to write an autobiography one day but didn’t have the time.
I had always been curious about her life before I was born and wanted to know more. As a fan of history, I thought about how knowledge was previously passed down through generations and we learned from our elders through stories.
I decided to combine these two concepts to learn more about her life experiences and create an opportunity for future generations to get to know her. I also figured that they would benefit from all the things she had learned throughout her lifetime.
We started work on our project at the beginning of 2024 and finished it mid-way through the year. I learned so much about her and her life that I didn’t know before. I came to see her in a completely different light, and understand things about her, myself and the family I hadn’t before. I paid more attention to the sometimes unnoticed aspects of her character, and as a result she felt more deeply and truly seen by me.
“The biggest lesson I have learned over the last ten years is just to take one day at a time. I’ve gotten better at this as I’ve gotten older.”
The project with my Grandma was such a success, I started to work on a separate project with my Mum. We are still working on this project, but already it has allowed us to understand each other better and feel closer to each other.
It helped us realise that even though we are Mother and Daughter, we have quite different values and lifestyles - and that’s okay. We’ve got so much better at communicating with each other and it has allowed us to see each other as individuals instead of just our family roles.
I was so proud of what we had achieved together, I wanted to share the project with others to allow them to do the same with their families. Particularly with the death of my Grandad, I realised that nowadays we often don’t actually know our role models that well, or what their lives were like before us. It’s a gift to know someone deeply, and it’s also a gift to be known deeply. Everyone deserves those two things.
