Are you thinking about creating memoirs, personal history or family history? You are not alone. There has been a flurry of activity in recent years as people seek to preserve their family’s history.
What most people have found is that there is plenty of history to preserve close at hand. The internet has made the study of genealogy easier than ever. A lot of people have garages or attics loaded with artifacts of their family’s past, including long cherished photographs, documents and objects. Preserving your family history simply means taking the time to preserve the stories that go with the artifacts our families collect and save.
A generation or two ago, when extended families lived in the same community, family stories would have been shared around the dinner table. The grandchildren would hear family stories from grandparents and parents repeated by their aunts and uncles. But today, families are spread across the map. Stories are lost, unless we make a conscious decision to preserve them.
Some people have preserved their family stories by taking elders to the booths set up around the Story Corps to record them for inclusion in the Library of Congress’ Folklife Center. Others have used services provided by Ancestry.com. But all you need is a recorder and some time to sit down with older relatives and gather their stories.
There are many different ways to do this. One is to have a family story circle. Get people together and ask them to tell their favorite family stories. As they do you may be surprised at memories of others in the circle to elicit details of a story or trigger whole new stories. Make sure to audio or videotape it to capture the stories people share.
The second technique is to conduct an oral history interview with the relatives who have agreed to talk with you. Sit down with each person in a private setting with an audio or video recorder. Run through the list of questions you developed, but be ready to pursue interesting tangents to get more detail. The more you let people talk about what they remember, the more stories you will get. You may also find that different relatives remember the same events in quite different ways.
The recordings from either interviews or story circles can be used as parts of your Stories To Tell book. Why a book? Books are the longest lasting of all media. Computer data is vulnerable to corruption and loss. The technology of DVDs may become obsolete. But books last.
Family photos, exposed to oxygen, are fading each day. By scanning them now, we can capture the image before it’s too late. As our memories fade and elders pass away, the urgency of preserving stories and images becomes more urgent. By capturing them in a book, you preserve your family history from the ravages of time, and offer them to generations to come.
