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I'm wondering if anyone's done a project of somehow capturing their family history in written or audio/video form. What did you do, what was your experience doing it, and was the effort appreciated by anyone? I know many people are into genealogy but that's not really the focus - as Werner Herzog would say, a family tree is perfectly accurate, but you don't really know what made your great-grandfather cry at night. My grandfather grew up an orphan in central Asia having had his father sent to the gulags, served as a sapper in the Red army, had his uncle busted by the KGB, some relatives die of hunger, survived a massive earthquake, moved countries like half a dozen times, etc. Thanks to his and my parent's efforts, I'm your typical 1st world upper-middle class rear end in a top hat whose biggest challenge is not getting fat by eating too many cheeseburgers. So, I'd like to capture some that for my parents, myself and any further generations (lol, yeah...), because hearing these stories is pretty fascinating and helps put a lot of things in perspective. Sadly my two grandmothers passed away and haven't been able to remember much for a few years before anyway, but luckily my grandfather is pretty drat sharp at 85 so I want to do it before it's too late. I'm considering a few options:
In any case, this isn't necessarily about specifics of the above approaches, I'd obviously need to research and prepare whatever I decide to go with. Mostly I'm curious if people do this kind of stuff and how that goes, so feel free to share anything.
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Feb 26, 2018 23:46
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| # ? May 5, 2024 17:01 |
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I did it as a class project last semester. The assignment was to do audio interviews with three family members from different generations, transcribe and annotate the results and do a paper based on it. I asked very general questions and mostly let them speak on whatever subjects they wanted, only intervening to clarify something etc. What seems to be important or meaningful for them should take precedence over what is interesting to you. Oral history is much better at grasping the world of meaning and subjectivity than obtaining hard historical facts, and observing what they choose to focus on (or omit) is essential in getting to that. I'd also recommend audio or video interviews rather than letting them typing it up, because writing is a much more deliberative form of communication, and you will miss out on a lot non-verbal information and clues (gestures, voice tone, pauses, talking speed and so on) that you should also record in your transcripts.
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Feb 27, 2018 20:29
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I would like get a recording of my Oma going over her life story one day. She's 91 years old, so I don't really have much time left, but the one time she told me and my mom of her youth in Germany during WWII, I was kind of flabbergasted. She watched her whole family die, had to steal food to survive, watched people get gunned down by airplanes, had to escape Berlin... It was pretty dark stuff that really informed what kind of person she became. For work, I am currently doing design and layout of a family history book. The writing team had to look through archives and interview a bunch of family members for stories. Each family branch and a number of individuals have profiles on them. So far, my biggest frustration with the book is the guy who's paying for it. He has entire chapters dedicated to himself and there's an awful lot on his mother, his sister and his wife. I think his sister has over 50 pictures and around 15 poems she wrote included in the book. With some sections that he wrote himself, he just goes on and on and on about the intricacies of his business and how long it took him to buy a particular lot he wanted. But then I get to the profiles on his kids, and it's barely a page or two with very few photographs. He didn't even have his own daughter's wedding photo! The only wedding photos we have of her is a kind of crappy one that another relative had taken. I ended up digging through files full of film strips to find evidence that his kids had a childhood and managed to find a few photos of a Disneyland trip amongst hundreds and hundreds of photos of trucks, tractors and other machinery. It just seems really sad to me that this guy doesn't really seem to care about his children. When our writer tried to probe him for details of his kid's childhood, or their likes and interests, he would go off on a tangent about his company and how successful his business was that year. His daughter is even one of his business partners, but he had very little to say about her. It's just sad, is all. I mean, the guy is spending many thousands of dollars to get this book done, and if he wants it to be mostly his personal memoirs, then that's what he's going to get.
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Mar 4, 2018 20:43
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fspades posted:I did it as a class project last semester. The assignment was to do audio interviews with three family members from different generations, transcribe and annotate the results and do a paper based on it. I asked very general questions and mostly let them speak on whatever subjects they wanted, only intervening to clarify something etc. What seems to be important or meaningful for them should take precedence over what is interesting to you. Oral history is much better at grasping the world of meaning and subjectivity than obtaining hard historical facts, and observing what they choose to focus on (or omit) is essential in getting to that. Nessa posted:I would like get a recording of my Oma going over her life story one day. She's 91 years old, so I don't really have much time left, but the one time she told me and my mom of her youth in Germany during WWII, I was kind of flabbergasted. She watched her whole family die, had to steal food to survive, watched people get gunned down by airplanes, had to escape Berlin... It was pretty dark stuff that really informed what kind of person she became. quote:For work, I am currently doing design and layout of a family history book. The writing team had to look through archives and interview a bunch of family members for stories. Each family branch and a number of individuals have profiles on them. The guy sounds pretty narcissistic but that's probably not entirely unexpected for someone who wants a book about himself. How old is he/the children?
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Mar 6, 2018 10:54
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mobby_6kl posted:Yeah do it ASAP. The whole "you might die soon so..." thing is pretty awkward but you never know, and the kind of poo poo people went through is pretty crazy and ought to be much more eye opening than a few old photos. I work for a small publishing company that specializes in history and aboriginal culture. By small, I mean less than 15 people, and all but 2 are part-time because there are only 6 computers in the office. We currently have 3 people working on this book. Knowing how much my boss charges, and how much time we've put into our current book, I just don't have that kind of cash kicking around. I'm estimating that this book will come out to around a $60-80,000. The guy paying us to do it can afford it. He was born in 1934 and his kids are in their 40's and 50's. He sent us more photos of his cars yesterday that I now have to squeeze into his chapter about his home and family life!
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Mar 6, 2018 15:54
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| # ? May 5, 2024 17:01 |
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I'm going to kind of break from the 'audio only' advice here and say that, while interviewing them and recording is great, don't stop there. Write to your interviewed relatives periodically as you do research (assuming this is going hand in hand with some kind of genealogy research. If not, it should, because people forget stuff and finding written evidence of events and presenting it to them can jog memories, especially finding old pictures or letters etc) and let them know what new information you've found. You'll also want to do some research to confirm things they tell you. Alzheimer's can be a hell of a thing and they may go into some rambling tale of driving across country in '52 and your research shows no, they never did, they worked in a pharmacy their whole lives and they're remembering the plot of some tv show or movie or something as their own life. Sometimes people will also lie, either to hide family secrets or make themselves look better/someone they don't like look worse. I would also say if they seem reluctant to speak on some matters to not press too hard; as you've shown above, some people have gone through A LOT of poo poo that was very traumatic and dredging up those old memories can be really painful. This especially applies to people who've been through wars. Grandpa may love to tell you the story of how they found a bunch of really expensive wine in a cellar in France and how his whole platoon got crunk on '02 Bordeaux that he later found out was 1500 bucks a bottle but he may be less inclined to tell you about how he had to hold in his best friend since childhood's guts as he lay dying in a foxhole during a siege and later went on to kill POWs because he was still pissed about it. There are a few places that you can find questions to help you get started if you're not sure what to ask: Family Tree Magazine's 13 Tips New York Public Library has a nicely laid-out plan of attack written by one of their genealogy librarians. The Smithsonian has an oral interviewing guide that may be a bit more scholarly-centric than you need (citing sources etc) but still is a good resource on what you might want to know. StoryCorps from NPR talks about 'great questions,' ones that can really get the ball rolling or unearth really interesting stuff. I'm going to end by defending genealogy research. A lot of people think you're just playing Pokemon with relatives, the whole 'gotta catch'm all' B/M/D (birth/marriage/death) collection mindset, and for a lot of people, especially beginners, that's how it starts. Some people never graduate beyond that. But true genealogy is 'where did I come from, what people/places/historical events made me who I am, made it possible for me to be here' and that's basically what you're doing. So its not an either/or thing, its a both/and, because while people's memories can be unreliable, so can written records, especially when it comes to stuff like 'where was my grandmother from in Germany/Ireland/whatever' or 'what was great-grandma's maiden name.' For instance, a lot of people around the turn of the last century would claim on census forms they were from Ireland/English as opposed to Ireland/Irish because there was a lot of discrimination against Catholic Irish vs. Protestant Irish and it was seen as higher class to say you were from the part of Ireland that was English/Protestant. That can really throw you off the right track. In short, don't blow off the research side, because it can lead you to more distant relatives with pictures or stories that can jog the memories of your closer relations or reveal stories older than you have access to in your own line. Also if you all want to join us there are two genealogy threads on SA, one in the Great Race Space that focuses on African-American genealogy here, and another more catch-all one in DIY/Hobbies here. Come bitch about the horrible handwriting of drunken semi-literate priests and laugh about how your super-religious conservative great-grandma got married when she was three months pregnant!
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Apr 3, 2018 16:10
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