By John Matuszak
Eastside Editor

"Your family History is not meant to be painted in broad brush strokes, summing up the meaning of the millennium. It is a description of your living room, of your grandmother's living room. Your life" 
          - D.G. Fulford, "One Memory at a Time"

History is something that happens while we are busy living life, commuting to work, raising children, watching our parents grow older.

Our own family histories hover about us like the air we breathe, ever-present but difficult to grasp.

Helping people find and hold onto their own unique family histories is the aim of author D.G. Fulford, a Bexley native and the author of One Memory At A Time: Inspiration & Advice for Writing Your Family History.

“It’s not the prom, It’s the prom dress,” explained Fulford of her belief in the little things that trigger the most profound memories and make the most fascinating history.

Fulford, now a Reynoldsburg resident returning after 20 years of living and writing in California and Nevada, compiled her first two books with her brother, Bob Greene, syndicated Chicago Tribune columnist and best-selling author.

Fulford’s latest, a solo effort with a foreword by her brother, furthers the cause of preserving family history, and shows, that the writing talent in the Greene family is pretty evenly distributed.

To Our Children’s Children, their first effort together, listed 1,000 questions that people could ask to begin recording their family histories.

“Questions and answers are the muscles and bones” of such an effort, Greene writes in the foreword of the new book. But people are also looking for the “heart and soul,” advice “both spiritual and practical” on the apparently daunting task.

“It surprised people. They didn’t understand that it could be fun,” Fulford said of the first book, which has sold 320,000 copies and gone through 37 editions.

Fulford (the D.G. stands for Debby Greene) wasn’t at all surprised at the desire readers expressed to get in touch with their past and leave something to the future.

“It’s so natural. This is helping people to do what’s so natural," said Fulford, calling family history “the softer side of genealogy.”

But what holds us up from digging into our own historical goldmine?

“The stomach acid quartet of inhibition, perfectionism, resistance and self­-doubt,” Fulford writes.

The author conquers these four horsemen with advice liberally laced with her own recollections, reverses and revelations.

The first rule of compiling family history is that there are no rules, Fulford advises. Have fun.

And it don’t hafta be perfect.

The best advice Fulford ever received came from a drawing instructor.

“What’s the worst thing that could happen?” the instructor asked as the artist stood stymied. “You’ll waste a piece of paper.”

Begin, and then begin again, Fulford learned.

No one can draw a straight line. And personal narratives don’t follow a straight path. Be ready to wander where the story leads, Fulford suggests.

Fulford’s journey from a Bexley childhood through marriage, motherhood, career and authorship has taken a circuitous route, although it appears to have come full circle.

A writing career was the furthest thing from her mind. But the seeds seem to have been there all along.

“The Greenes are great storytellers,” she said. Her father, Robert Greene Sr., became president of the Bron-Shoe Company, “but he wasn’t born to bronze shoes. He was a born actor.”

Her mother, Phyllis, is highly educated and the family members were great readers.

Fulford began her working life as a layout artist in the advertising department for Lazarus department store, with a group of creative people she said “opened my brain.”

Marriage took her to the west coast. She began writing for a Pasadena weekly paper as “the world’s oldest intern,” and secured assignments with Sports Illustrated and Esquire with her brother’s help.

Then “the thing that does not happen” happened. She got a try-out with the Los Angeles Times’ “Daily Life” section. All she had to do was write 12 columns. In three weeks. This from a woman who had never composed at a computer before.

She stayed for seven years.

“I starting preserving family history for 260,000 people,” Fulford said. “I’d write about my daughter, about my parents, about my (90-minute) commute to work. You never know you’re doing it while you’re doing it.”

Fulford stayed in L.A. until she felt “as tired as Marcia Clark,” the O.J. Simpson prosecutor, and she retreated to Virginia City, Nev., for several years.

She came back to Ohio last year because her father was dying. And decided to stay.

The Greene children (including younger brother Tim, now a real estate developer in Colorado) were given a priceless gift several years ago when their parents passed along their own personal histories, Mrs. Greene longhand on legal pads, and their father a year later into a tape recorder.

This is the way we live on for future generations, Fulford believes, quoting an old gypsy proverb, “You have to dig a really deep grave to bury your daddy.”

No grave is deep enough to hold down the chords of memory, the author has learned.

Fulford has conducted workshops and writing groups with thousands of people who have read To Our Children’s Children and its companion, Notes on the Kitchen Table, in which people responded to the question of what note they would leave for future generations.

The deceptively simple questions found in To Our Children’s Children, sprinkled throughout the new book, can yield unexpected results.

With the question “Where did your family sit outside during the summer?” a member of an African American church recalled her childhood in the rural south, and the segregated library across the road where blacks were required to enter a side door.

The woman’s father barred his daughter from participating in this apartheid, saying “If you can’t go through the front door, you can’t go in at all,”

This is the kind of history that is never found in a textbook, Fulford observed. But it is the kind of history that needs to be preserved. “You did not set out to tell the story of civilization, but you did that, too,” she writes near the conclusion of her book.

Such storytelling is not only a means to bond families, but to build community, Fulford discovers.

“No one can remain an enemy if you know what her favorite bedtime story was, or how homesick he got when he went away to camp,” she writes.

Fulford is enjoying being home on her wooded lot in Reynoldsburg. She indicated that she would be interested in serving as the Tomato Festival’s senior queen, but she will have to wait four years to meet the 55-year-old age requirement.

The author is available to conduct family history seminars and writing groups. Her web site address is www.familyhistories.com.

She has two new book projects in the works, but will not spill the beans on what they are about.  “They’re good beans,” she confided.