What is their life story?

How many times has somebody said to me “But my life is so ordinary, it’s boring, they won’t be interested”?

Having just spent a weekend talking with people from all walks of life at a baby boomers and retiree’s expo the subject of an ordinary life of no interest to descendents was raised numerous times. It is true, some people have had what appears to be a more interesting life, more excitement, done more ‘things”, experienced more and have stories to tell. Lives like that are the raw materials for many a documentary and I love hearing about them myself.

Just as certainly I enjoy hearing family stories shared that seemingly are about the minutiae of life. Why? It is all very well to know through genealogical research that John was born in Dubbo (a regional town in country NSW Australia), lived from X date to Y date and was a plumber. But what was John like as a person? Where did he grow up? What was the house and family life like? What changes did John see in his life? What was his philosophy on life? What did he enjoy doing and was he particularly good at anything like sports or perhaps music or some other pastime?

At some stage in our lives most people ask the question “where do I come from”? This is the key question for the popular TV program “Who Do You Think You Are”. What makes me who I am? In asking those questions of ourselves a part of it is discovering more about those ancestors of ours who have come before. And, unless your particular family has been good at record keeping, been wealthy and well documented, had individuals who have been written about in newspapers or otherwise had significant actions recorded, then you are lucky to get more than a few snippets about the lives of those who have come before. Your descendents will be interested in your story. They will want to know about you and your life. Whether you sit down in a quiet moment and write the chapters of your life out long hand, sit at a computer and type or commission an Oral Historian such as myself to record your life story or that of a significant loved one in your family the thanks of your descendents will wring long and loud.

Each of us has a story or stories to pass on, the stories from our own life and the stories of our elders, both personally known or stories that have been passed on to us. Due to timing, those around you right now may not outwardly show interest in your story or give the impression that they already know your story. I bet they don’t but that is a subject for another time. It may not be your children, however, it may be your grandchildren or great grandchildren that go seeking to know more about you and the circumstances in which you lived.

With knowledge comes understanding, you can give a great personal gift to your descendents no matter how you preserve your story. It’s worth preserving and I can assure you it will not be boring to those who come after you.

For tips on how to make it easier to preserve your life story you may wish to view a series of free videos I have prepared. Just click on the link on “How to Write Your Personal Memoirs” to see the first in the series.

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.

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.

Family Recipe Books Hold Family Stories

What’s important to you? Your family?  Your friends? Food? All are common answers to the question: What’s important to you?.  Food and family are so common a combination and the kitchen so central a place to where families often gather don’t overlook the importance of family recipe books when you research your family history.

As the family gathers to celebrate major holidays such as Christmas, Easter and significant birthdays many of us have family recipes for those special celebratory foods that somehow the celebration wouldn’t seem the same without.  Other families share the cooking duties and gather in the kitchen, either getting in the way or helping, as we prepare food to later share. And at the parties themselves most often the kitchen is the most populated place at any significant family gathering.  There is something primeval about food and its preparation, central to the hearth and the inbuilt knowledge of the importance of fire, food and warmth to the wellbeing of family.

But what about the family recipe books themselves? Have you ever stopped to really look at a family history book?  Not the ones you buy in the shop but those that have been written out by hand and which have evolved as the keeper of the book evolved.  Passed down from generation to generation these family history gems often contain much more than how many eggs and how much flour goes into a particular dish. They are snapshots of time. Recipes written on the back of envelopes, letters from friends or family that contain more than just a shared recipe.  These gems give you an insight into the personal interactions of the owner or owners of the recipe book.

The photos accompanying this blog are from one of my own family recipe books.  The family recipe book once belonged to my patriarchal grandmother. It’s now passed through my own mother’s hands and on to me and I can trace entries and cuttings placed there by both.  I have always endowed it with significance but what can it tell me beyond the recipes themselves?

Firstly there is the book itself.  A ledger book in origin, when asked,  my father tells me it was from my Great Uncle Bob’s office, a desk accountant at a major newspaper in New Zealand.  No doubt it was permanently “borrowed” from there as it was well bound and provided lots of pages for entries. The well thumbed corners and the stains on various pages tell me its own story.

Recipes Can Be Recycled Family Letters

Another item that is well worn and wrinkled is the hand written letter from “Flossie”, my Great Aunt to her sister “Aggie” my Grandmother, a direct connection to Flossie as the letter is undated but can be placed in a period as it asks about “Bobbie” my father coming back from some military training and my Grandfather registering to vote so with a little more detective work I could date it fairly accurately.  And the recipe on the back of the letter? This is for a chocolate cake, a favourite in our family.

Family History Grocery List 1957

On turning over another recipe I find the store docket from Blue & White Stores, from days when you went into the grocer and sat on a chair and gave him your order. Dating from May 1957 it’s an historic snapshot of what was ordered at the time and what it cost.

Family Recipes for Health

Another section of the recipe book itself has detailed recipes for making homemade potions for curing ailments.  In a time when medicine was expensive and home cures were quite common this tells me what my grandmother thought important for her family.  yet another slip of paper, typed, details out a special diet my grandfather had to stick to after he suffered a heart attack and was confined to working from home a few hours every day until he passed on from the same condition a few years later.

Envelopes Tell You Stories

The last photo I have included is an envelope address to Signalman M. B. Lawrence, post stamped 1943. Right in the middle of the WWII every scrap of paper was re-used and so I can see this was to my Uncle, sent to his army base and then to his home address perhaps because he was on leave, it seems to have followed him about.

All of these items are of interest to me and some are of general interest.  It tells of a family that sent short letters to each other to keep in touch and the various scraps of letters also indicate who wrote to who most regularly as those letters were re-used to write on the back of them.  It shows the grocery purchasing of the time and the prices of goods and also the address where the family was living at the time.  The recipe book also records what family recipes were used for health care and therefore what ailments feature in the family history and how they treated themselves with home remedies.  And it has snippets of my Father and my Uncle’s military service with references in letters and mail addresses to them whilst in service.

So the next time you pick up a family recipe book have a closer look and see what yours can tell you about your own family’s story.

What story does your family have to tell?

Every person has their own story to tell and all family stories are almost as equally as interesting. It’s just that most of us don’t have the army of professional researchers available behind the scenes who have spent, days, weeks and months searching for the clues to flesh out the story that lies behind basic birth, death and marriage records that are presented in an interesting one hour TV episode. Stories of triumph and despair, famous and infamous, of poverty and wealth, fortunes made and lost. A journey to discover the stories of their family, stories of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles.

“Some families may not make a television program, but everone is just as fascinating. Sit down and talk to your grandparents because they’ve got these great stories and you don’t want them to be lost before they’re gone”
Kate Humble – UK Television Presenter and subject of BBC “Who do You Think You Are”

As anyone who has embarked on a family history project will tell you, it’s the stories they discover that makes researching your family history so worthwhile.  Equally they will tell you their frustration at perhaps just having a name and dates, maybe just a story snippet, disappointment at having nothing more than these basic facts to bring to life and get a feeling for the personality and how their ancestor lived their life. Someone they would love to know more about or the joy at discovering more of their family stories and getting to know more about where they come from.

Why don’t many people take the time to capture their own story or that of their loved one and preserve it for future generations?  Writing your own life history or that of a loved family member can be very rewarding but it can be a huge commitment of time and despite the best intentions few under take the journey.  Fortunately today’s technology assists with a practical alternative for those who are time poor but who still  want to preserve their own life story or those of their families.

Specialist oral historian services such as Lifetime Memories and Stories will arrange to interview and record your family member’s stories and produce a custom book with CD audio recording of their story for future generations to enjoy. Professionally transcribing the oral history interview and, together with your selection of photos and documents scanned digitally, they will prepare for your family and descendents a custom printed book of your story with pictures and an audio CD of the interview that captures the emotion of you or your family member telling their story in their own words. Isn’t this fantastic, not only being able to read the story and see the photos in the context of their story but to also be able to hear your family member’s own voice telling their story!  Treasured memories to keep forever.

Bring meaning to Family Photos With The Story Behind Them

It is a sad fact that as we get older our memory does fade and stories passed on by our parents, grandparents and other family members often fade with them.  Little bits of the family stories remain, often treasured by different members of the family, and sometimes can be teased out to recreate something of the “whole” story, if we can ever get everyone together to talk about it.  It does need a family champion though and too often some of the key family memories holders have passed on by the time that family story keeper emerges.  There is nothing more frustrating than hearing “Aunt Sue told me something about that” and now of course Aunt Sue is no longer with us.

Whether you undertake to write your own life story or that of a family member or whether you choose to engage a professional company like Lifetime Memories and Stories to help you, please don’t leave it until your treasured story keepers have passed.