My mother's parents were born and raised in the mountainous Julian Alps. They knew snowy winters. When they migrated to the United States, most of the places where they lived were in hilly snowy regions.

Last month, I visited one of those towns. It was a typical winter day with snowflakes drifting down onto the snow-covered landscape. I could hear the clunk and scrape of snow shovels as house owners cleared their sidewalks and made paths to the garages. One hundred years ago, the house owners would have been doing a similar thing. The difference would be that they would be clearing a path to the barn and the storage sheds.

I bundled up in extra layers of clothes and went outside. I passed a long woodpile that reminded me of the importance of having enough wood to last the winter. Preparing the wood would have taken days of hard labor. There was no need for fitness gyms in those days.

As I walked towards town, time took on a new dimension. It was marked by the amount of daylight and the sounds of people working.

It must have been like this for our ancestors. Food, water, shelter, and clothing would be priorities, and obtaining them took time. It's no wonder that few diaries and vital records exist for our ancestors. They were busy with survival.

My notion of what kind of records would have been generated changed as I walked through that snowy landscape. It would have been time-consuming to travel to the county courthouse to record deeds and vital records. People would have saved up their business for a day when it wasn't snowing, when they didn't have wood to chop, when they didn't have seeds to sow, when they didn't have any of the work that needed to be done in those pre-electricity and running water days.

While it is not possible to know exactly what life was like for our ancestors, a trip to where they lived is a substitute. Walk the paths that they walked. Go to the houses. Read about the history of the area to learn about life in those days. Then, when you have collected the records and the history, write up the story.