Keep your Father's Stories

One of the most special gifts any of us can give our fathers is the gift of listening.

“My father took me to school every single day from middle school until the end of high school. On the ride to school, he told me stories. On the way back home, he told me stories. I never really listened to the morning stories because I was too sleepy. I never listened to the afternoon stories because Iwas usually thinking about drama with friends or boys. During high school I felt too cool to hear his stories about how things were back in his day. -Maha”

That’s what I mean about the gift of listening. Maha is acknowledging, after her father had passed away, that she did not listen to the stories he told and by implication has missed out on a richness he was sharing with her. I am sure all of us have been guilty of the same actions as Maha but if you still have the opportunity to rectify it then do so. Now is the time to take action, so ask your father for his stories.

Lifetime Memories and Stories has put together a concise Free eGuide on How to Record a Life Story Interview with your Father. It provides short practical how to do it advice on recording your father’s story with a video camera or digital audio.

Stories about how he lived when he grew up, stories about your ancestors that your father knew andhad direct contact with or whose stories were passed on to him. Every single person has interesting stories to tell and those stories from your father are a part of your heritage and deserve appreciation. Your father’s stories about his work, the life and times he lived in, his experiences and what he thought about things, people and the events that were important to him.

Do not pass up the opportunity to have a dialogue with your father and preserve his stories so that you can pass them on to your children.

Lifetime Memories and Stories has put together a concise Free eGuide on How to Record a Life Story Interview with your Father. It provides short practical how to do it advice on recording your father’s story with a video camera or digital audio.

Why not make a start on recording your father’s story this Fathers’ Day? You might life to watch the Lifetime Memories and Stories video on Personal Memoir Writing which provides easy to follow practical advice on organising your thoughts when preparing personal memoirs and the How to Ask Questions for Family History podcast with Kim Leatherdale is a good resource when planning your approach to your father and handling any emotional charges that may exist.

Father’s Day is a special day that has been set aside to remind us to celebrate fatherhood and male parenting. It is also celebrated to honour and commemorate our forefathers. Father’s Day is celebrated on a variety of dates worldwide and typically involves gift-giving, special dinners to fathers, and family-oriented activities.

There are records going back almost 4,000 years to Babylonian times where a young boy called Elmesu carved a Father’s Day message on a card made out of clay wishing his father good health and a long life. The modern Father’s Day is a celebration inaugurated in the early twentieth century to complement Mother’s Day and actually took place in Fairmont, West Virginia on July 5, 1908. The special day was organized by Mrs. Grace Golden Clayton, who wanted to celebrate the lives of the 210 fathers who had been lost in the Monongah Mining disaster several months earlier in Monongah, West Virginia, on December 6, 1907.

Many of our parents come from an age where the oral history tradition of passing on stories was an everyday part of family life. I am sure that by taking the time to listen to your own father’s life story your own life will be enriched.

Happy Fathers’ Day!

The Trigger for Your Fathers' Stories Can Be Many

Men and seemingly fathers in particular, are often reluctant to share their stories.  Perhaps it’s an experience they don’t want to remember or an event in their life that they deem to be nothing special.  After all many of them are from the time when it’s been drummed into them “not to blow your own trumpet”.
Nevertheless you may be richly rewarded by perseverance and patience in seeking your own father’s stories. 

Most Dads have interesting stories; it’s just that you need to find a respectful way to ask them to share them with you.

My Father’s Story – The Flood of ‘56

With Fathers’ Day in Australia rapidly approaching I have been reflecting on fathers’ day and fathers’ stories and a story my own father told me sprang to mind and I thought I would share it.

Dad always wore this particular watch, a pocket watch.  It wasn’t fancy but had a nice face.  I can’t remember now what made me ask about it but one day I asked him where he got it from.  He told me he had been given the watch by Mr & Mrs Clarke, the two “old people” who lived down the end of the shared right-of-way (driveway) that our family house was on.

A few minutes went by and I wondered why they had given him the watch.  After all a watch was a pretty significant thing, especially so to a young boy as I was at the time.

Mr & Mrs Clarke had originally owned the land that my family home was built on and lived in the farm house across the creek.  Their garage was an old broken down shed at the end of the drive and a foot path ran from it across a foot bridge and up a deeply over grown path to their house.  They had sold the land to my parents around 1954 and as the first young couple to build on one of the five blocks that were carved out of the original land my parents knew them well.

But this still didn’t explain to me the gift of a watch.  The naivety of the questions from a young son probably got me past my father’s reluctance to tell the story.  I was old enough to realise he was reluctant to tell it and can still remember that feeling about it.

The story my father told me was that late in one afternoon in the winter of 1956 my parents were placing me in a basinet for my afternoon sleep whilst outside a huge storm raged.  It had been raining for hours and the flood waters were rising and surrounding our house.

The flood had crept up during the afternoon and my parents were keeping watch on them because they were concerned with the nearby creek breaking its banks.  Dad decided that he needed to go and check on the creek level so off he went.  Turning the corner of the Clarke’s garage, at the end of the driveway, he was walking in water that firstly covered his ankles but which got much deeper very quickly.

As he got closer to the footbridge over the creek he could see in the dim light that much of it had broken away.  Right in the middle of the now raging creek Mr Clarke was clinging to one of the remaining uprights of the bridge and calling faintly for help above the sound of the raging water.  Dad called out to him and he responded.  Looking around quickly for something to hold onto he bent a stalk of the tall bamboo that grew nearby and using that as a lifeline he waded out into the torrent.  Struggling to keep his footing on the slippery rocks of the creek bed he reached out and the two men linked arms.

Just as Dad pulled Mr Clarke towards him and they were inching their way back to the creek bank, by this time the water up to their chests, a large log came down and crashed into the remaining upright, sweeping the remainder of the bridge away in the torrent. A miraculous escape!

Supporting a very battered and bruised Mr Clarke my father then brought him to our home where they both dried off and got into dry clothes before settling down in front of the fire to warm up.

My father had saved Mr Clarke’s life!

Some weeks later Mr Clarke presented Dad with a watch in recognition of him saving his life.  No other fuss was made and I have only ever heard one other oblique reference to the event by a neighbour during a flood many years later.  Although that watch itself wasn’t that expensive it is a real connection between the two men, the man whose life my father saved in 1956.

People are interested in people.  Why do you think magazines about people are so popular?  Go into any news store and just look at the breadth of magazines that are covering the goings on of people.  Oh look!  Here is a celebrity behaving well or badly, oh another one wearing the latest fashion and yet another at a film launch or opening something or other.  The fact is that as humans we often live through the lives of others and have a deep and complex interest in what people do.  And that’s just those we know through the media!

When writing your personal memoirs you will need to develop your cast of characters that help you to illustrate your story.  This doesn’t just mean a list of who is who but a rounder, fuller description of who they are, what they looked like, what they sounded like and what they did.  Your readers, just like the magazine readers, want to find out the details of the people in your life.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In this video Oral Historian Greg Lawrence details some of the things you should be looking at when it comes to looking at the people involved in your story. Did they have any special mannerisms, things such as tapping the side of their nose when telling you something of particular importance? Did they have a special way of saying things or special sayings that they repeated and peppered their conversation with? What relationship did you have with the people in your story? The free video training is full of tips on how to organise your thoughts about the people in your story.

What about when you are writing your own family history, personal memoirs or autobiography?

Ask anybody who has embarked on genealogical or family history research and you will find that they get a real “Hey this is neat” moment when they discover letters, descriptions or an event in a person of interest’s life.  It is those facts and descriptions which add colour and depth to any family history story and draw and hold your reader’s interest and bring you or your ancestor to life.

The fun and enjoyment for readers of life stories and family stories is getting a real sense of who your characters are.  You have the advantage as a the writer of a family history, personal memoir or your autobiography in that you are able to provide that description and depth right now, as you create it for your own and others enjoyment.

When writing a family history, personal memoirs or an autobiography, we need a way of pulling out the past memories and shining a light on them to see if they will have any part in the story we wish to tell.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In this video, Oral Historian Greg Lawrence talks about the power of lists and how they can help your memory recall for personal memoirs writing. The video includes easy techniques that every writer can use. Lists allow you to jot things down memories as you recall them and take advantage of the memory by association process as you prepare to write. The memory method described in the video details how you can use the power of lists to enhance your memory recall.

By preparing memory prompt lists when you come to develop your story structure you are easily able to include details about places, people and events. Later in the “Personal Memoirs Writing” video series Greg will share powerful techniques you can use in organising your memory prompt lists. These techniques will enable you to leverage the power of memory prompts in your writing.

Remember, whether writing a family history, your personal memoirs or autobiography, the list is your friend.

One of the core memory prompt lists, and a pillar of personal memoirs writing, is used to provide your readers with a sense of place. A sense of place helps you contextually place your story’s characters in the events and actions in your story. By including descriptions and details about where your story takes place allows your reader to build up a mental picture of how that place influences your characters and the story you are telling. Details assist readers to empathise with your characters.

The video talks about how to include the different places the characters in your story lived and worked or experienced life events. It provides practical advice for developing useful memory prompts to recall the important places in your own story. Greg provides a descriptive example of an Australian home and setting during the late 1940s and ‘50s where the story teller evokes a real sense of place and by doing so allows the reader to add a layer of understanding about the story teller’s life and perform a mental comparison between the story teller’s experience and their own.

Today’s homes, towns, cities, farms and society are manifestly different from those of even a few short decades ago.  A sense of place helps your story come alive and capture your reader’s attention.

Personal memoir writing is a pursuit which depends on your motivation to finish.  Start something without very clear thoughts on what your purpose is and, well, nothing much will happen.  Writers block and unfinished or unedited memoirs will be the result and they will soon mount up to a point where just looking at them is a daunting task.  Without a clear purpose before you start to write your autobiography or memoir when you take a break and put aside your pen you will never quite get back to them.

In this video, “Personal Memoirs Writing Video 001 – Motivation is Everything”, Oral Historian Greg Lawrence talks about clarification of your motivation before you begin to write.  What to consider when clarifying your purpose for writing your personal memoirs or autobiography.

This is the first video in a series of a free online video training course on “How to Write Your Personal Memoir or Autobiography”.   The series will cover memory prompting, researching your memoir or autobiography, finding a theme, memoir structuring, writing and editing your memoirs and self publishing options for memoirs and autobiographies.

Any time you set out on a writing project you need to be clear about the why you are writing.  If you are writing just for yourself or for close family then write for that purpose.  If you are writing for family you can more freely use an informal writing style and include references to things that family insiders will inherently know about and nobody, well not many, will get upset if your writing style is a bit too clumsy or references are left out.

If you decide that your life story, personal memoirs or autobiography will be written for a wider audience then you will need to pay more attention to your writing style but equally you need to focus on just who is your target audience. For your memoir to have wider audience appeal you will need to pay more attention to providing contextual information and facts so that your readers are able to reference your writing and connect it to their own experience or general knowledge about the subject.

This video series will provide you with a methodology for uncovering the facts about your subject and how to organise those facts as writer’s fuel to increase the interest and engagement with your audience whether you are writing a for family or a much wider audience.

But why write your memoirs in the first place?  A memoir implies a focused piece of writing recalling a specific time or experience in your life.  It might be reminiscences about your work, family event or series of events but if you don’t have a strong motivation and passion you will rarely end up with a piece worth publishing in any form. That is if you end up with a finished piece at all.
Clarify your purpose and motivation for writing your personal memoirs before you start.

In what way have the changes to the way we live our life in the 21st century impacted on how we learn our family stories and preserve our life story?

Talking this week with a large group of retirees the subject of sharing family stories in an informal setting arose. As the conversation continued it drifted towards subjects concerning the time we share together with extended family and how those opportunities to create shared time for family story telling has changed.

Some participants in my conversation talked about sharing homes with two or even three different family groups from their extended families.  Yet others recounted years of living in the same street or within a 10 minute walk of their extended family.  In other words, in times past there were few “empty nests” and when a family member married they often continued to live in the family home or else set up their own family home not too far away from their roots, remaining in close contact more often than not.   Over time, with greater household wealth, better transport options and the internationalising of work opportunities, families began to spread out over cities, countries and then throughout the world.   Now I can logon to my Lifetime Memories and Stories facebook page and see siblings, children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, uncles, aunts, cousins and friends and their families spreadout in every state in the country and throughout the world in almost every continent.
What do these profound changes in the way we live our lives mean to family story keeping?

They way we are physically dispersed around the world and how we live today means that few of us will ever again spend as much time with in the same physical space with our extended families as those of earlier generations once did.

Grandchildren won’t spend as much time with grandparents, nieces and nephews won’t spend time with their uncles and aunts and, because by and in large it was the informal time that we spent living together or gathering for shared holidays, frequent family gatherings, perhaps today in the 21st century we are more distant from our families than ever before.  We simply do not have the time to get to know each other on a deeper level as families once did.

When you know someone well and share experiences it allows for a safer and more comfortable space where personal story telling on an even deeper level can occur.  What I mean is that the difference between a grandparent and grandchild spending time together when they are very familiar with each other and when they see each other once or twice a year is immense.

The meeting that occurs in a once or twice a year physical relationship does not necessarily reduce the love expressed or lessen the joy experienced when we do meet but it does mean that the time spent together is more of a “catchup” or a “treating” time together and our interactions tend to be concentrated on that level.   When you know someone well and are comfortable just “being”, the opportunities to explore beyond the surface are more.  This is what has the greatest impact on the traditional family story telling opportunities.   Opportunities like summer holidays spent together when conversations naturally surface references to times past and we feel comfortable asking about “old aunt so and so” or what did you do when you were working at… or living at…

I am not suggesting that we can ever recreate the style of living we once had in simpler times past.  I am, however, suggesting that we must be conscious to grab each opportunity that presents itself to get to know our greater family and family stories with both hands.   And also perhaps take advantages of the technology that is now available to help supplement the face to face connections we no longer have.

Facebook is one example that can help you to stay in touch and build and maintain relationships with family and friends over distance. It cannot replace shared times in a physical space but at least it has the facility for us to share and reach out.  Personally I have begun to use it to reach out to my extended family that is located throughout the world.  I can see by the interactions I am having across time zones and generations that by doing so I have begun engaging and communicating with cousins that I have been able to share very little time with in a physical sense.  We have begun to share little bits of our lives and tentatively comment on each other’s activities.  From that we have started to share little bits of our family stories at a deeper level and I freely admit I am encouraging it wherever I can for I know that we each hold previous pieces of our family’s collective knowledge.

Recently I was introduced to another great website specifically created for the preservation of life stories.

“Story of My Life“  is an online place where the tools exist to preserve your life story in words, audio, video and images and preserve that for all time.  There are other sites like it but in my exploration thus far I think “Story of My Life” is a pretty good one.  You can keep your story private, share it with select people or the world and through the  “The Story of My Life Foundation” they have created the means whereby they assure users that this data is accessible online forever.  The foundation exists to do nothing else but to store and safeguard life stories, forever.  And I think that is a pretty neat thing!  In a future post I will blog more specifically about how I am going to use it and what I think of the technical aspects but I can see the unending possibilities of sharing my family story.

Together with my extended family I can see us building a really great repository for our future generations and perhaps rebuilding a family community in new ways for the 21st century at a “grass roots” level.  Perhaps I can use facebook and “Story of My Life” to inspire new generations of the family to get together in the real world and build on something we have only just begun online and if by posting this I have started you thinking about the possibilities for your own family then I would be very happy.

There is no doubt that if we want to preserve our family stories into the future we need to adapt and change.  I would be interested in knowing how you are currently using or plan to use the new technology available to you to build and maintain your own connections across your extended family.

Respect Boundaries When Asking Family History Questions

When you embark on family history research there comes a time when you want or need to ask family history questions of your living relatives.

Family members often have the real hidden gems to your family history that can make the time and research you invest in your genealogy jusdt that much more rewarding.

But how do you ask family history questions that will provide the answers you seek?

List to a Podcast with great family history question tips.

Families are made up of a complex web of interpersonal relationships with many subtle nuances that you may not even be aware of. When you ask questions about another person’s life story or ask family history questions seeking information, unknowingly you may be pushing against your interviewee’s boundaries in ways that are uncomfortable to them and you don’t even know it!

How can you get past some of the barriers that are present to find answers by asking the questions you want to?   How can you engage your subject and have them provide the information you are seeking?

To find some answers to these common questions and find the best way to ask family history questions I turned to relationship expert and licensed councillor Kim Leatherdale.  Remember families are relationships.  Who better to ask for tips on how to approach family members respectfully but a relationship expert.

In this podcast Kim Leatherdale and I explore the question of how to get a family member to open up to answering questions about our family history.  Kim provides some great tips on questioning techniques and what may lie behind the ducking and weaving we get sometimes when asking older relatives about the past.  Our conversation provides some great tips you can use in your quest for family history AND also in your everyday life.

Kim Leatherdale

Kim Leatherdale, LPC, ATR-BC, NCC is a professional relationship councillor and licensed therapist.  She counsels couples and individuals through video-counseling, phone sessions, and in-person meetings. Kim is a well-liked speaker and blogger and is based in New Jersey, USA.

Kim’s blog, Creating Rewarding Relationships, is packed with useful information on how you can improve and create rewarding relationships for yourself.

Perhaps they do tell you their life story but often as the memoir and stories they share are told whilst you are focused on something else how can you possibly remember all their stories?

Lifetime Memories and Stories helps individuals make that process easy and fun. This short video outlines our methods for memoir writing and life story recording using oral history techniques and life story books.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I know that this is only a taste but be sure to visit the blog regularly as over the next few months as we will be posting a series of videos and articles with some detailed practical information on how to go about writing your memoirs and capturing your precious family stories.

Don’t delay, capture your precious family stories.

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Archives - Key To Your Personal Memoirs

Greetings from the Northeastern United States where in January 2010 it is now – 9 °C. It is an honor to write for my Australian friends. In fact, the archives management graduate school basic text from which I studied 18 years-ago was written by Australian archivists, so I feel in a way that I am coming full circle. I’d like to thank Greg for the opportunity to introduce myself to a new audience. He has asked me to write about how to decide which personal papers to keep. So I will attempt to give you some helpful hints for getting started.

Within every household is a treasure trove of information that tells the stories of individuals and families. Everything we have accumulated over the course of our lives is a symbol for who we are. Our personal papers are the most telling of our items, but can cause us the most confusion. We are all attached to our “stuff,” but few of us see beyond a sentimental care. Yearbooks thrown in cardboard boxes, clippings kept in deteriorating folders, and old utility bills from our first apartment litter filing cabinets and closet floors. How do we determine what we should save?

1. The most important step is to try to think of your things as a collection that tells the story of your life. What items form the core of your story? Which fill in the details and which are not very important to the story at all?
2. Try to detach yourself from your items. You want to try to get over your sentimentality. (i.e. “I NEED THAT! My second grade teacher gave me that popsicle when I won the spelling bee and the popsicle stick reminds me of that day!”) Try to look at your items as a researcher would. What materials tell your personal story and what things really are not important to it at all. This is not to say that sentimentality should never play a part in decisions, but an awareness of personal biases will help you be more logical. In the archives world, “appraisal” means determining what to keep. Once you find a way to detach yourself, you can perform appraisal.
3. Aim to keep things that add to your story by telling it in chunks. Archivists prefer groupings of papers to individual items. A folder of back and forth correspondence between friends tells us much more than one letter.
4. Set up a plan to get rid of administrative items such as bills when they are no longer needed. In the U.S., we must retain such materials for seven years for tax purposes. After that, we should get rid of them. Talk to your accountant and lawyer about how long you need to keep these evidential records and then clear them from your clutter when the time comes.
5. Review the condition of materials and remove what isn’t salvageable.
6. Keep your vital records and keep them in a safe place. Birth certificates, mortgage papers, and other such records should be kept in a fire proof box with copies placed off-site.
7. Remove unlabeled or unidentifiable materials. There is little use in keeping photos of people you and your family members do not recognize.
8. Remove duplicates of materials.
9. As you go through your items, you may begin to notice patterns in your collecting. For example, you may have a lot of your college papers, but little from earlier years. Make an effort to locate missing materials to fill out your story. Retrieve items from your mother’s attic or talk to family members about their memories of your childhood.

When you think of your materials as the key to your biography, deciding what to keep becomes a little easier.

I wish you well in your archiving endeavors.

Melissa Mannon, MSLS
“Visit Archives Info for more information on – Securing Our Cultural Heritage”
“Visit Archives Info Blogspot to read Melissa Mannon’s Blog ”

Melissa Mannon

Melissa Mannon is owner of ArchivesInfo and is a professional archivist with almost 20 years experience helping individuals, cultural heritage institutions, and businesses with the management of their records and personal papers. She is the author of numerous articles and her first book about assembling archives is due out with AltaMira Press, a division of Rowman and Littlefield, in mid 2010.