Archive for the Category ◊ Storytelling, Oral History, and Recording Stories ◊

31 May 2010 Share Your Veteran’s Stories Online
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As part of the National Memorial Day Concert held last night on the west lawn of the Capitol in Washington D.C. sponsors offer a website for veterans to Share Your Stories.

The site encourages veterans to tell their stories because, “Each veteran’s experience with war is an important part of history that should be passed on to future generations.”

Veterans may be reluctant to speak about their experiences in war time. “Families and friends are often very curious about those times but, because the veteran may not bring them up, the loved ones feel they shouldn’t either.” But when families do support and encourage their veterans in telling their stories the results can be very positive. “… though difficult, sharing these stories can have a powerful healing effect both for veterans and their families.”

The website provides a list of questions to help veterans and their families start the conversation. Veterans may choose to share all or part of their stories online.

If you don’t want to add a story you might still want to visit the site to read the stories posted by veterans of America’s conflicts from World War II to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Click here to visit the National Memorial Day Concert website.

27 May 2010 Community History Project’s Lessons for Family Historians
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I ran across an article on a book project underway in Pike Lake, Ontario, a summer vacation destination for fishermen and boaters, which I thought offers some good insights for a person undertaking a family history project.

The Community Association of Pike Lake located a hundred miles west of Toronto was developing a management and stewardship plan for the lake. In the process the association discovered fascinating stories going back to the days of the original Algonquin residents. Members decided that the stories should be preserved in a book.

It is the process of gathering those stories that is of interest to the family historian. The committee began by asking people to contribute their memories of life on the lake. But many community members needed a little prodding. The initial contributions in hand the committee began to employ the interview techniques of  an oral historian. “We’re reaching out to people whose families were early settlers on the lake to get some of the stories,” said Kay Rogers, chair of the book committee.

Rogers was able to enlist the cooperation of a local woman with a widespread social network to whom residents were willing to talk because “people knew and respected her.” Rogers also discovered a man who she described as “a walking encyclopedia on the history of this area.”

A family historian can benefit greatly from getting support for her project from a trusted senior member of the family who can encourage others to contribute. Even more important is to discover who the keeper of the family stories is and get them talking. Most families do have their own “walking encyclopedia” who know at the stories of distant grand parents or cousins.

The Pike Lake project will be completed and published this summer as Voices of the Lake – A History of Pike Lake.

To read more about the Pike Lake book project click here.

24 May 2010 Give Memoir or Family History Readers an Experience
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One of the most difficult challenges in creating a memoir or family history is to bring the stories you recount to life.

Richard Gilbert, in his blog Narrative, provides an interesting take on a topic we have discussed here several times – showing rather than telling as a way to bring writing to life. Gilbert expresses the idea as “giving our readers an experience.”

Gilbert suggest that writers should employ techniques outlined by writing theorist Peter Elbow in his classic book Writing With Power. “If writers desire readers to breathe life into their words, then they must breathe experience into their words as they write,” says Elbow.

To do this, says Elbow,

If you want your words to make a reader have an experience, you have to have an experience yourself—not just deal in ideas or concepts. What this means in practice is you have to put all your energy into seeing—into connecting or making contact or participating with what you are writing about—into being there or having the hallucination. And no effort at all into searching for words. When you have the experience, …, you can just open your mouth and the words that emerge will be what you need. (In the case of writing, though, you will have to revise later.)

Experience the thing or event is better advice, he says than, “Give me more details.”

Click here to read Richard Gilbert’s May 22, 2010 post.

23 Apr 2010 The Art of Story Telling in Memoirs and Family History
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One of the first pieces of advice a novice writer is likely to hear is, “Show don’t tell.” But what does this really mean? Essentially it means learning how to use descriptive details to give your stories a sense of time and place and an emotional tone which will help readers feel what is going on in the story as you relate it.

Begin by being specific. For example if you are telling a story that involves a car show the reader what kind of a car. Is it “a faded, rusty old Chevy Nova held together with Bondo” or a “sleek metallic blue Porsche Carrera?”

Your story is about a beautiful morning. Help the reader experience the beautiful morning by involving her senses in the description. Is the sun warm? How blue is the sky and how white are the puffy clouds? Would she hear sparrows signing in the tree? Smell the roses blooming in the garden? Would she feel the moisture on the lawn?

Use the right word – le mote juste as the French would say -  to show exactly what you mean. Don’t say, “He ran fast,” say “He sprinted.” Mark Twain once advised crossing out all the adjectives and adverbs and rethinking what you have written. But the right adjectives and adverbs can sharpen your description. Here are some examples of choosing the right adjective or adverb. (italics added) In Four meetings Henry James wrote, “I saw her but in diminished profile.” In her short story Girl on a Plane, Mary Gaitskill wrote, “He sat down, grunting territorially…” And Lorrie Moore in her story Community Life wrote, “She wished to start over again, to be someone living coltishly in the world…”

Writing guru Natalie Goldberg advises, “Don’t tell readers what to feel. Show them the situation, and that feeling will awaken within them.” Or ask Mark Twain put it, “Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.” Contrast the sentence:

He sits on the couch holding his guitar.

with the more evocative

His eyes are closed, he’s cradling the guitar in his arms like a lover.

Another way to bring your stories to life is by using dialogue. Let your reader listen in on the conversations of the people you are writing about. But keep a couple of ideas in mind. “You can’t reproduce real speech,” said creative writing professor Josip Novakovich. ” You can approximate it now and then, but your dialogue should be quicker and more direct than real speech.” The conversations you include in your stories must be edited. “Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.” You know?

22 Apr 2010 Writing Narrative Family History
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An increasing number of genealogists are taking the advice of a recent Daily Tip on Ancestry.com. The tipster advised, “I decided to put all my family tree into narrative form so that it would be easy to understand for my non-genealogist relatives.”

If you are trying to make the leap from genealogical chart to family narrative you should borrow a few techniques from the fiction writer. Your narrative needs to incorporate the elements of a good story: character, setting conflict and theme. Here are a few ways to heighten the interest of your family’s narrative.

Emphasize the drama in people’s lives by looking for the most interesting thing that happened to them and beginning their story at that point. Think turning points: the decision to adopt a child; a fire that destroyed the family home; quitting a job at a big corporation to launch a small business; or, being diagnosed with cancer. Jump into the narrative at that dramatic moment and use flashbacks to fill in back story later.

Create a strong sense of time and place by exploring the historical context of your relatives’ lives. This can work in two directions. You might begin by listing important events in the person’s life on one side of a sheet of paper and matching them with a historical or cultural event which happened at the same time on the other side. For example juxtapose a late 1960s college graduation and wedding with the nation’s angst over the Vietnam War and the draft or your grandfather’s opening of a Chrysler dealership with the rise of OPEC and the 1974 gas crisis. The other way to do it is to think of major historical currents and think about how they affected your ancestors. For example, if family members relocated geographically during the 1930s was it because of the economic pressures of the Great Depression.

Look for recurrent themes in your family’s history. A Chinese-American client of ours wanted to title her family’s history Imported and focus on the theme of immigration and adjusting to a new culture while preserving the old one. Another focused on the tradition of serving in the military as a defining feature of his family. Themes like emphasizing the importance of education or sacrificing for the children or searching for opportunity are all themes around which to organize your narrative.

Look for a dramatic way to end your ancestor’s story. You don’t have to conclude each story with the person’s death. For example, family historian Sharon DeBartolo Cormack explains that she ended a book with a man’s 85th birthday where he read a two page statement of his philosophy of life concluding, “Well, so much for the ruminations of a tin horn philosopher, just turned 85.” Enough said. And far more uplifting than to continue to the much more somber occasion of his death.

15 Apr 2010 Immagination and Truth in Memoir and Family History
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A well told story is built with a wealth of details. As is axiomatic among writers it shows rather than tells what happened. Setting is carefully described. Actions are traced in detail to allow the reader to see exactly what is happening. Dialogue brings the scene to life allowing the reader to hear what the characters said. These details allow the reader to experience the emotions that the characters were feeling as the events described unfolded.

Unfortunately, most of us don’t remember stories that way. We remember the Cliff Notes version, a summary of what happened. As we try to capture a story in a memoir or family history, we can work at remembering. Maybe some of the details are there, somewhere in the recesses of our memory. But many are not.

This is where it’s okay to draw upon imagination. For example, if you want to recreate a conversation that occurred years ago or maybe one you have only heard about from relatives as a part of their stories you won’t know exactly what was said. To tell the story vividly you have to imagine what the participants would have said and recreate the dialogue.

What constitutes “truth” in recounting stories is that you use your imagination to get the emotion and meaning of what happened right rather than being bound by the need to report only the limited factual details that you know or can recall.

28 Mar 2010 Using Story Telling Techniques in Writing Family History
Author: admin |  Category: Family History Research and Preservation, Storytelling, Oral History, and Recording Stories, The Author’s Craft  | Leave a Comment

An increasing number of genealogists are taking the advice of a recent Daily Tip on Ancestry.com. The tipster advised, “I decided to put all my family tree into narrative form so that it would be easy to understand for my non-genealogist relatives.”

If you are trying to make the leap from genealogical chart to family narrative you should borrow a few techniques from the fiction writer. Your narrative needs to incorporate the elements of a good story: character, setting conflict and theme. Here are a few ways to heighten the interest of your family’s narrative.

Emphasize the drama in people’s lives by looking for the most interesting thing that happened to them and beginning their story at that point. Think turning points: the decision to adopt a child; a fire that destroyed the family home; quitting a job at a big corporation to launch a small business; or, being diagnosed with cancer. Jump into the narrative at that dramatic moment and use flashbacks to fill in back story later.

Create a strong sense of time and place by exploring the historical context of your relatives’ lives. This can work in two directions. You might begin by listing important events in the person’s life on one side of a sheet of paper and matching them with a historical or cultural event which happened at the same time on the other side. For example juxtapose a late 1960s college graduation and wedding with the nation’s angst over the Vietnam War and the draft or your grandfather’s opening of a Chrysler dealership with the rise of OPEC and the 1974 gas crisis. The other way to do it is to think of major historical currents and think about how they affected your ancestors. For example, if family members relocated geographically during the 1930s was it because of the economic pressures of the Great Depression.

Look for recurrent themes in your family’s history. A Chinese-American client of ours wanted to title her family’s history Imported and focus on the theme of immigration and adjusting to a new culture while preserving the old one. Another focused on the tradition of serving in the military as a defining feature of his family. Themes like emphasizing the importance of education or sacrificing for the children or searching for opportunity are all themes around which to organize your narrative.

Look for a dramatic way to end your ancestor’s story. You don’t have to conclude each story with the person’s death. For example, family historian Sharon DeBartolo Cormack explains that she ended a book with a man’s 85th birthday where he read a two page statement of his philosophy of life concluding, “Well, so much for the ruminations of a tin horn philosopher, just turned 85.” Enough said. And far more uplifting than to continue to the much more somber occasion of his death.

09 Nov 2009 Preserve a Veteran’s Story
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Veterans Day, November 11, is a time for all us to remember and honor those who served their country, and to reflect on how that service impacts their lives, and ours.
Are you are a veteran? We urge you to tell your story. If you know a veteran, we urge you to encourage and assist them in making sure that their story is preserved.
Over the past several years there has been an increase in awareness of the importance of creating records of the experiences of our military veterans. There are several nationwide efforts underway to collect these stories. The most ambitious is probably the Veterans History Project being conducted by the Library of Congress.
The Project, “…collects, preserves and makes available the personal accounts of American war veterans so that future generations may hear directly from veterans and better understand the realities of war.”
Veterans’ stories can be told through:
• Personal Narratives – audio and video taped interviews and written memoirs (our favorite)
• Correspondence – letters, postcards, v-mail, and personal diaries
• Visual Materials – photographs, drawings, and scrapbooks
Similar efforts by the American Veterans Center and the National Veterans History Archival Institute are also underway. Individual military services have veterans their own story initiatives too.
At Stories To Tell, we are participating through the Association of Personal Historians, which is a partner in the Veterans History Project. If you, or your veteran, needs help getting his or her story told, get in touch and we’ll help you to gather those invaluable stories.

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