When I was paying for my food at the weight loss center this morning, I noticed that the waiting room was more crowded than usual. I commented to my counselor, “Boy, you’re ‘doing a land office business’ this morning, aren’t you?” She smiled and chuckled, but it dawned on me that she really didn’t understand the comment. So I decided to share a little history lesson.

I said, “That was one of my Great Uncle Glen’s favorite expressions. He lived in Oklahoma.” I then explained the origin of the expression.

My uncle’s father, my Great Grandfather Raymond, was one of the homesteaders taking part in the Oklahoma Land Rush during the late 19th Century. He was 16 years old when he saddled his horse and took his place alongside the other settlers, waiting for the gun to go off, signaling the start of the rush to grab some free acreage. Each homesteader wanted to be the first to stake a claim on a desirable parcel of land, register that claim, and build a structure on the property to validate the claim.

Raymond’s parents had already identified the parcel they wanted, and were waiting there as they let their young son do the hard part––racing against other settlers to be the first to reach that acreage and literally drive stakes into the ground to claim ownership. The next step was to register that claim with the state’s Land Office. All the many homesteaders were lined up outside the office to register their claims. And I believe that was the origin of the expression, “doing a land-office business.”

The people who were sitting in the waiting room were listening to the story, some familiar with the history and the younger ones hearing it for the first time. I suddenly had a thought, and shared it with the other customers. “Isn’t it going to be sad when the people of my generation are all gone, and these little family histories and expressions will be lost forever.”

There was a lot of head nodding as if they all had the same thought: “If I’m gone, who will know what I know?”

There is a great deal of history––in our families, in our towns, in our country––that will be gone and forgotten when people of my generation die out. Perhaps that’s why so many of us seek to record these memories in self-published memoirs.

If you have special memories and historical mementos, I encourage you to record them somewhere before you’re gone ––in a notebook, or a computer file, or a book––so the next generations will know what you know.