Family relationships from a distance

I have such tender feelings for my children and grandchildren. I am thinking about David and Valerie and their families being many miles away. I know that time and distance sometimes cause such relationships to wane or be lost. Both of my grandmothers experienced significant disconnection from their family roots through moves.

Grandma Lewis (top) left her family in Floyd County VA in 1908 to move to Washington State with her husband and three children. She went back once–in about 1930–with her youngest, Lorene, age 5. By this time here dad had died, but her mother was still living. (She would pass away three years later.) I called Aunt Lorene and asked her if she knew whether her mother had missed her family in Virginia. She remembered that there were letters sent back and forth with the Virginia relatives. She said that being the youngest she didn’t have personal knowledge of how things were initially when the family moved west. Her mother was very even tempered and low-key and positive in her attitudes, and didn’t show negative emotions. Lorene did recall that family members said that at first her mother had been quite homesick and as a result had lost quite a lot of weight, getting down to 120 pounds.

Grandma Davenport (bottom) left her family in Logan shortly after her marriage at age 21 (3 Oct 1901) to live with her husband in Hood River OR. She was by far the youngest child in her family, born when her mother was 47 years old. (She had 9 siblings who ranged in age from 9 to 27 when she was born.) She was born after the family’s pioneering period was over and when her family had prospered financially, and was much loved and spoiled by all. She was a tender, sensitive woman who occasionally suffered from depression in later life. She had a very close relationship with her mother. I think she went back to Logan to have her first child, Franklin, near her mother (31 Oct 1902). Other children were born in Hood River OR. She may have returned to Logan on other occasions (there was a fairly direct passenger train route from Hood River to northern Utah), but communicated primarily with her mother by regular letters. Her mother died in 1912 in Logan at the age of 80 years. According to family members, Grandma Davenport was so distraught by this loss, that in a fit of frustration, burned all of her mother’s letters.

In our day, we have been blessed with a lot of tools for maintaining family relationships that were not available to my grandmothers. Here are my current thoughts about a strategy for keeping up family relationships at a distance:
1) Blog or e-mail with pictures on a regular basis, to maintain a sort of consistent and permanent journal of details about our own selves and household, that is available to all who care. Try to have at least a weekly entry.
2) Web phone conferences, using on-line resource such as Skype (about monthly, to include all family members), for immediate and personal interaction, especially with children and family members who are not the family blogger/e-mailer.
3) Phone calls, as often as needed/desired.
4) Personal visits, when possible.
5) Social media such as Facebook connections, to make sure that something important is not missed. (Lower priority)
6) Stay abreast of and use new technological options, whatever they might be, when they become available and improve on any of the above.