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Aaron's A to Z Garden of
Information
Preserve Your Family
History by Writing Family Stories
(Genealogy)
Preserve Your Family History by Writing Family Stories
by LeAnn Ralph
From the e-book: Preserve Your Family History (A Step-by-Step Guide for
Writing Oral Histories)
http://www.booklocker.com/books/1545.html
"Everyone has a story to tell." It seems like a cliche—but it's true. After
working as a newspaper reporter for more than eight years, I know that
everyone does, indeed, have a story to tell.
But even before I started working as a journalist, I knew that life
experiences make interesting stories. Consider my parents.
My mother was the daughter of Norwegian immigrants, and her grandfather
homesteaded our dairy farm in Wisconsin in the late 1800s. My father was the
son of German and Scottish immigrants. When Dad was a little boy, his
parents worked as cooks in a lumber camp in northern Wisconsin. As I was
growing up, Mom and Dad would tell stories about their own childhoods. When
Mom was a little girl, the whole family would sleep in the screen porch on
hot summer nights. Indians also used to stop at our farm, and gypsies would
camp nearby during the summer. When Dad was a little boy, he enjoyed
spending time at the lumber camp kitchen because all of the cooks knew that
little boys needed special treats during the day: a piece of Key-Lime pie, a
slice of chocolate cake, or a couple of extra-large sugar cookies. When Dad
wasn't staying with his parents at the lumber camp, he lived with his
grandmother, a tiny tough-as-nails German woman who owned a German shepherd
named Happy.
Unfortunately, I never wrote down any of those stories, and I never asked
Mom and Dad to sit down with a tape recorder and tell those stories. My
mother died in 1985 at the age of 68, and my father passed away in 1992 at
the age of 78. The majority of their stories, except for the few that I
remember, are lost forever. Your family stories do not have to share the
same fate.
Here are some tips for writing your family stories:
• Decide which person you want to interview first (Grandma or Grandpa, Mom
or Dad, Aunt or Uncle), and then tell that person about your plan to write a
collection of family stories and ask for permission to conduct an interview.
• Set a formal date and time for the interview. This will give your
interviewee an opportunity to mentally prepare and to remember various
stories that he or she would like to talk about.
• Provide a list of questions several days or weeks before the interview.
This will also give your interviewee time to remember various stories.
• Focus on a single subject or event in your list of questions—school,
holidays (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July), birthdays, seasons
(spring, summer, winter, fall)—the list is endless.
• Ask open-ended questions and not "yes or no" questions. "How did you get
to school?" is better than "Did you walk to school when you were growing
up?"
• Use a tape recorder to record the interview. Taping the interview will
help you gather details that you might miss if you are only taking notes.
• Chat about something else for a while if the person you are interviewing
seems nervous at the prospect of being tape-recorded. Your interviewee will
soon relax and won't even notice the tape recorder. And once you start the
interview, you will find that one subject will lead to another and one
question will lead to another.
• Transcribe the tape and write up your notes after you have finished the
interview. This, in itself, will provide a fine record of the stories that
are told "in their own words." And you will be in good company. Studs
Terkel's oral history books are written that way, and they are fascinating
to read. Terkel's books include Division Street (1967), Hard Times (1970),
Working (1974), The Good War (1984), The Great Divide (1988), and RACE
(1992).
• After you have finished all of your interviews and have written down the
stories, print the stories from your computer and put them into a three-ring
binder. Make multiple copies and give them to family members as gifts. Or
you might want to consider publishing the stories POD (print-on-demand).
There are many POD companies, and for a price that starts out at a couple of
hundred dollars, you can publish the stories as a trade paperback. To find
POD companies, conduct an Internet search with the keywords,
"print-on-demand."
Here are some examples of questions to help you get started with your
interviews:
Subject: school
1. Where did you go to school when you were growing up?
2. Tell me about any amusing or unusual incidents that happened on your way
to or from school.
3. What kinds of clothes did you wear?
4. How many students were in your class? How many students were in the whole
school? How many grades?
5. What was your favorite subject? Why?
6. What was your least-favorite subject? Why?
7. Who was your favorite teacher? Why?
8. Who was your least-favorite teacher? Why?
9. Tell me about your best friend.
10. Tell me about your happiest moments in school. What was your best
accomplishment?
11. Tell me about your worst moments in school. Did you learn anything from
your worst moments?
12. What advice would you give to students who are in school today?
E-book Available: Preserve Your Family History (A Step-by-Step Guide for
Writing Oral Histories) (66 pages; $7.95) contains step-by-step instructions
and tips for interviewing people, transcribing the tapes, and writing and
editing the stories. The book also contains 30 sets of questions, more than
400 in all, on 30 different topics. Order the e-book here:
http://www.booklocker.com/books/1545.html
LeAnn Ralph may be contacted at http://ruralroute2.com
bigpines@ruralroute2.com
LeAnn R. Ralph is the author of the books: "Christmas in Dairyland (True
Stories from a Wisconsin Farm)" ( August 2003), "Preserve Your Family
History (A Step-by-Step Guide for Writing Oral Histories)" (e-book, April
2004), and "Give Me a Home Where the Dairy Cows Roam" (Oct. 2004). You are
invited to sign up for LeAnn's FREE! monthly e-mail newsletter, Rural Route
2 News & Updates. Visit —
http://ruralroute2.com |
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