Writing Projects
Preserve Your
Family History by Writing Family Stories
"Everyone has a story to tell." It seems like a cliché -
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 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), best friends - the list is endless.
. Use the "who, what, where, when, how, and why" strategy when formulating your
questions. "Who was your best friend?" "What was the most fun you had with your
best friend?" "When did you get to see your best friend?" "How did you and your
best friend meet?" "Why was this person your best friend?"
. 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?
© 2003 LeAnn R. Ralph
mailto:bigpines@ruralroute2.com
LeAnn R. Ralph is a freelance writer in Wisconsin. She is the editor of the
Wisconsin Regional Writer (the quarterly publication of the Wisconsin Regional
Writers' Assoc.) and is the author of the book, Christmas In
Dairyland (True Stories From a Wisconsin Farm) (Aug. 2003). Click here to read
sample chapters and other Rural Route 2 stories -
http://ruralroute2.com
*Preserve Your Family History (A Step-by-Step Guide for
Writing Oral Histories* (66 pages; $7.95) provides a set of instructions and
tips based on my nine years of experience as a newspaper reporter in compiling
questions to ask, interviewing people and writing their stories. The book also
includes more than 400 questions (on 30 different subjects) to help people
conduct those interviews. The e-book is available for download from —
http://www.booklocker.com/books/1545.html
#####################
