Tools for Preserving Your Digital Family History Files

We’d like to thank blog reader Richard Skooter who commented on our previous post “how to Digitize Your Family History.” Richard advised, “I'd like to add that once you've digitized your family's information, store it online so it won't become lost due to a hard drive crash or lost or stolen CD-ROMs. And you won't have to transfer the files from one to another every time you buy a new computer.” I agree.

Preserving data is essential. CNET UK’s Cloud Computing Guide offers a simple explanation of  online storage is a great way to achieve this goal:

“…backing up data to the cloud means you're backing up data to a hard drive in a secure data centre via your Internet connection, instead of just to a hard drive in your house. In fact, that data centre might be located on the other side of the world.

Using cloud backups, you've removed from your shoulders the burden and stress of protecting whatever device your data is stored on.”

 Richard recommended two services for online storage. Amazon’s S 3 and Rackspace.

Amazon S 3 promises to protect your data with a “a highly durable storage infrastructure designed for mission-critical and primary data storage.” New users get up to 5 GB of storage free for a year, then modest fees kick in. The Best Techie website review concludes, Amazon S3 provides a highly durable storage infrastructure designed for mission-critical and primary data storage.”

Rackspace is a bit more expensive. But Clloud which offers “Web Hosting Tips and Reviews” observed, “We quite like that Rackspace Cloud File comes with a control panel to allow you to manage your files, unlike Amazon’s S3 that throws you in at the deep end so-to-speak and expects you to find your own tools.”

We’d like to add a word about our own favorite, Dropbox. Dropbox promises, “A single secure place for all your stuff.” This includes providing you easy access to files from all of your devices including phone, laptop and desktop. Says CNET, “It’s a breeze to use, works as intended, and is stable.”

As you make the transition to digital files for all you family history research, documents, photos and objects consider one of the many good options for online storage to assure that your data will always be there.

Click here to read the CNET UK article Essential Backup Services Compared

Click here to visit the Amazon S 3 website

Click here to read the Best Techie Review of Amazon’s S 3

Click here to visit the Rackspace Storage website

Click here to read the Clloud Review of Rackspace

Click here to visit the DropBox website

Click here to read the CNET Review of DropBox

How to Digitize Your Family History

Got questions about digitizing your family history research?

Make it Digital available on the website of Digital New Zealand has answers. “The Make it Digital approach is to identify elements of good practice for digital content creation.”

The site offers guides to digitizing documents, photographs, audio and video. There are a series of Guides to various aspects of the process of creating digital content. The most relevant for family historians and genealogists is the Guide to Digitising Family History and Whakapapa (Maori Genealogy). (One thing you’ll see is the British spellings of some words like digitising.)

The Guide begins with a section to help you “Choose What to Make Digital” which includes the Make It Digital Scorecard to help you decide.

The “Create Longlasting Digital Copies” deals with issues like how to digitize family photos, documents and objects, the best scanner settings and image formats, and digital cameras.

There is a section on “Recording Family History Digitally” with information on both audio and video recording and a separate guide to “Transferring Oral Histories from Cassette to Digital.”

The final section offers advice on “Protecting Your Digital Copies.”

Make It Digital offers simple, but complete advice to people who need some guidance in navigating the available digital technologies to enhance their family histories. It’s definitely a site worth visiting.

Click here to visit the Make It Digital site and the Guide to Digitising Family History and Whakapapa



Write a Family History in 28 Days? Maybe!

Lynn Palermo at the Armchair Genealogist recently issued a challenge on her blog. The challenge - Write Your Family History in 28 Days. Palermo asks her readers to commit to producing a family history in the month of February.

Is it doable? Maybe. Maybe not. A lot depends on you and how ready you are to begin writing and how much of an organizational plan for a book you already have. In either case, I absolutely agree with Palermo’s statement that, “Too often genealogists put off writing their family history. They feel the research is never done and therefore they are never ready to start the writing.”

If you want to get a family history book written set a completion date. Then work backward from that date to create a calendar of things you need to do to meet the deadline. Then do it.

Beware of the trap that snares so many genealogists. Your research will never be finished. Research is a pursuit that will last a lifetime. A book is a presentation of what you know now. Don’t be afraid to write because your research isn’t finished.

Click here to visit the Armchair Genealogist and see Palermo’s challenge.  



A Great New Site For History Fans

The History Department at the University of Texas at Austin has just launched a website “For history buffs who want reading recommendations and short, interesting, digestible stories every day, the website offers a meaningful, dynamic, and ongoing conversation about history in the form of text, audio, and video histories on subjects that span the globe. The site is designed for anyone who is interested in history, from an avid reader of history to a history film aficionado.”

The site offers six sections. Here’s a preview of the initial offering in each section

• Main Feature – This section will focus on a recent book by a member of the University’s History Faculty. This month’s book is Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War by MacArthur Fellowship and Bancroft Prize winning Professor Jacqueline Jones. The site offers a summary of the book, a video interview of the author and a video of the author reading from her book.

• Read - This section presents brief reviews of books: in the initial post Edmund S. Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975); Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England 1780-1860 (1998) and Frederick Douglass, Narrative of his experience as a slave on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.  It also includes a book talk by Professor George Forgie (from whom I took a seminar during my summer as a William Robertson Coe Fellow in American history at Stanford many years ago)  on seven Civil War related titles.

• Watch – This section features reviews of films dealing with Chinatown, San Francisco in the 1970s and The Old Man and the New Man in Revolutionary Cuba. All films can be purchased and downloaded from the site.

• Discover – Presents images of Navajo rugs from the University’s Art and Art History Collection and illustrated texts created in a 12^th Century German monastery.

• Listen – Presents an oral history interview “Voices of India’s Partition” with Zehra Haider whose Muslim family left India for Pakistan when the countries were partitioned in 1947. A second audio, “LBJ and Vietnam: A Conversation” between the President and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy is also available.

• Texas – This section includes articles on Texas’ current budget crisis, Texas Jewish cemeteries and “Mexicans in Texas During World War II.”

It looks like an interesting site doing everything it can to use multimedia tools to bring history to life. Not Even Past will be a welcome companion to the University of Houston’s Digital History site.  

Click here to visit Not Even History.



Lessons for Family Historians from Paul Theroux’s "The Trouble With Autobiography"

In 2500 rather turgid words on Smithsonian.com, American travel writer (The Great Railway Bazaar) and novelist (Mosquito Coast) Paul Theroux tells us The Trouble With Autobiography.

He begins with a short account of his own family history, a terse, factual summary of several generations. He then states, “And these 500-odd words are all I will ever write of my autobiography.”

I am sure Theroux didn’t mean for his brief sketch of his family history to be interesting. He was making a point about why he wouldn’t write one of any greater length.

Theroux’s foray through the genre isn’t all that interesting on its own terms, but it does offer a couple of unintended lessons for family historians. Unfortunately, many drafts produced by novice family history writers resemble Theroux’s abbreviated account. They reduce people’s lives to lists of facts, rather than capturing the stories behind the facts.

Let’s examine a paragraph from Theroux’s summary:

My maternal grandparents, Alessandro and Angelina Dittami, were relative newcomers to America, having emigrated separately from Italy around 1900. An Italian might recognize Dittami (“Tell me”) as an orphan’s name. Though he abominated any mention of it, my grandfather was a foundling in Ferrara. As a young man, he got to know who his parents were—a well-known senator and his housemaid. After a turbulent upbringing in foster homes, and an operatic incident (he threatened to kill the senator), Alessandro fled to America and met and married my grandmother in New York City. They moved to Medford with the immigrant urgency and competitiveness to make a life at any cost. They succeeded, becoming prosperous, and piety mingled with smugness made the whole family insufferably sententious.

Just look at the untold stories! His grandfather’s “turbulent upbringing in foster homes’; the “operatic incident’; his grandparents’ meeting in New York City; and, the story of how they made a life. To bring these people to life, a family historian would have to tell these stories. It is the stories that will draw readers into a family history.

Interviews with living relatives and close examinations of family documents provide windows into the family lore that provide the researcher with the stuff of stories. Yet there’s another lesson to be learned from those stories in Theroux’s piece. It’s good to conduct your interviews and research with a degree of skepticism.

Why? Theroux quotes Rebecca West, the English journalist and literary critic, who said, “Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.”

A family historian seeking the truth about her ancestors may need to look carefully into the margins of what they wrote and said about each other and about themselves.

Click here to read Paul Theroux’s The Trouble With Autobiography



Every Document You Ever Needed On Your PC? Maybe!

Here in the age of the Google search it sometimes seems as if any information anywhere is available instantly after entering a few search terms and a mouse click or two. And for the most part it is. That is unless what you want is a document in an archive or a special collection somewhere. There is no database for those documents. If you’ve ever done archival research you know that first you have to locate the library, historical society or archive where the information you are looking for might be located.  Then you have to travel to the archive. When you get there you will be presented with boxes or folders of documents which are sometimes handwritten and illegible. Organization is of the most general sort only, often all documents for a particular period of time, some important most irrelevant to what you are seeking. It often feels like looking for a needle in a haystack.

The reason the process is so difficult is that scholars and archivists have been unable to transcribe and publish the huge volume of documents history has left us. That may be about to change.

Scholars tasked with transcribing troves of historical documents have decided to seek help through crowd sourcing.

University College London has been transcribing the papers of Enlightenment Philosopher Jeremy Bentham for 50 years and have completed less than have of the documents in its possession. The New York Times reports that, “Starting this fall, the editors have leveraged, if not the wisdom of the crowd, then at least its fingers, inviting anyone — yes, that means you — to help transcribe some of the 40,000 unpublished manuscripts from University College’s collection that have been scanned and put online.”

The work of volunteers will be corrected by editors and eventually published.

Sharon Leon of George Mason University is working on a project to publish 55,000 War Department documents destroyed when the British burned the capitol during the War of 1812. To further the project she has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to create a digital tool that any library or archive could make available to enlist public assistance in transcribing documents.

Max J. Evans, the former executive director of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission applauds the effort. “This way, at least, the papers of the founding fathers and others, despite being tough to read and unsearchable, would not be ‘held up in these scholarly editing offices for years and years, and not only available to a select group of scholars,’” he told the Times.

The road to crowd sourced document transcription will not be without bumps. Daniel Stowell, the director and editor of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln tried hiring non-academic transcribers and discontinued the practice because “we were spending more time and money correcting them as creating them from scratch.”

“We’re not looking for perfect,” Ms. Leon of George Mason said of crowd-sourced transcription. “We’re looking for progressive improvement, which is a completely different goal from someone who is creating a letter-press edition.”

While I won’t hold my breath waiting for every document I may ever need to examine to be available on my office computer, there may come a day when it does take only a Google search to locate virtually anything a researcher might need.

As a researcher who has spent many hours digging through boxes of miscellaneous paper I can only say I hope it’s soon.

Click here to read the New York Times article “Scholars Recruit Public for Project.”



Triggering Stories - Tools for Collecting Family History

January is the most popular month for family history research reported Shelly Talalay Dardashti on the My Heritage Genealogy Blog.

I’ll bet that one of the big reasons is the holiday family gatherings that so many people attend. They sit around the living room or the dinner table and sooner or later begin to tell family stories. They recall the one about Grandma Bertha’s adventures in the 1893 land rush to homestead the former Indian Territory. Someone else remembers the story of how Grandma Cecil and Grandpa Merritt moved to San Francisco after they came west from South Dakota to start a hog ranch in Roseville up near Sacramento only to get wiped out by hog cholera. Someone from another branch of the family tells the one about always eating venison because Uncle Tommy got hired by the State of New Jersey as a hunter to kill deer to thin the herds.

Those conversations stimulate everyone’s desire to make sure their family stories are preserved. So January is a big month for research.

The problem is that when your new enthusiasm for recording the family history leads you to call or visit Great Aunt Tillie the convivial stimulus of a holiday glass of hot mulled wine or a slice of pumpkin pie has also become a memory. You ask Tillie to tell you what she remembers and she’s like Ronald Reagan after the Iran-Contra scandal. All she says is, “I just don’t recall.”

It’s frustrating. It’s an experience that every family history researcher has had.

So what can you do to help Aunt Tillie remember?

The key to a successful interview is preparation. Begin by creating a Memory List. Brainstorm your own family memories and list anything you can remember about people, places, actions, or ancestors. Anything you recall is important to include, even if it is only a fragment of a memory. Once you have your list go back through the items and add a memory prompt or cue for each item on the list. The prompt should be short – three to six words. Here are some examples:

• Aunt Ceil – had five husbands
• Grandpa – lost print shop in Great Depression
• Great Uncle Louie – a boxer as a young man
• Grandma – a beautiful rose garden
• Cousin Eddie – died in Flu Epidemic in 1918

Each prompt is designed to trigger some memory or recollection about the ancestor.

When you get together with Aunt Tillie, whether in person or by telephone, use the memory triggers on your list to help her get started talking. Not every prompt will necessarily lead to a story, but many will. Once she starts talking, interrupt as little as you can. She may take off in a completely different direction than you expected and you’ll hear stories you didn’t anticipate and knew nothing about. Let her talk. When the conversation runs down you can ask for clarification or additional details.

A second thing to remember is to keep the conversations relatively short. Older people get tired. You’ll learn more while Aunt Tillie is energetic. Two short conversations will often net more good family stories than one long one. You may also find that when you return for the second conversation she has recalled stories triggered by reflections on your earlier interview.



Paid Obituaries Will Be a Loss to Family Historians

David Phillips, publisher of the Bluff County Newspaper Group, in Southern Minnesota, decried the nearly universal trend among newspapers to charge family members to place obituaries in the paper. It's an issue that should be of concern to genealogists and family historians as well.

Phillips' concern is that payment for obituaries, or for placement of stories of any kind for that matter, blur the line between news and advertising. “It makes news a commodity to be sold, not information that a newspaper publishes because it is important to readers,” he says. “The content is dictated by the institution and the timing is dictated by finding the sponsors willing to pay for its publication.”

That' certainly a valid concern for a publisher. When Phillips opened up the topic for discussion among members of the International Society of Weekly Newspapers a second issue emerged. Obituaries are an important part of the historical record of a community. Anyone who has attempted to research a person fro an earlier era whether a historical figure or a family member has undoubtedly found useful information in obituaries. When obits become a paid service of the newspaper they are less likely to appear, or at least less likely to be more than cursory death notices.

“An editor from Maryland wrote: 'Think about the community history that's lost because obits have become ads. Many people's lives have been boiled down to a name, age, hometown and date of funeral - two or three sentences tops. Why? Probably because these families don't have the money to capture their loved one's life. That's a sad delineation and a loss for history. If your paper insists on money for every obit, you'll actually be preventing the community from knowing anything about certain deaths. It will be creating, in effect, a separate system for people with money and those without.'"

While newspapers attempt to cope with the myriad of problems threatening their very survival, it's nice to see publishers thinking about what might be lost as they try to generate enough revenue to try to keep their ships afloat.

Researchers certainly know that if obituaries do disappear their task will become difficult in future years.

Click here to read David Phillips full post

Family Christmas Stories

What better way could a family historian spend Christmas Eve than sharing family stories from holidays past?

A website called My Merry Christmas.com offered its readers to participate in a forum titled My Best Christmas Stories by submitting their own holiday memories. From those submitted a collection of the 25 best was published on the site. There are stories of romance, humor, tragedy, faith and insight. The stories are wonderful and would be great to share with your family. Who knows, they might trigger some sharing of holiday memories among your around the Christmas tree.

The Tucson Citizen online edition tells the story of a family that had that experience recapturing Grandma’s memories of Christmas 1920 in The Cole Family Christmas.

Personally, I can’t think about stories of memories without recalling the poet Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales. It’s a great read, but it’s even better if you can get a recorded version of Thomas reading his story. What a voice!

Best wishes for a wonderful Christmas for you and your family!

Click here to visit MyBestChristmas.com

Click here to visit the Tucson Citizen



A Conference For the Family Biographer

I just ran across a conference I'd love to attend. The Compleat Biographer, a daylong event sponsored by the Biographers International Organization, is scheduled for May 21, 2011 at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. It sounds like a session that family historians might enjoy. The conference schedule offers sessions under four broad headings – Research, Writing, PR / Marketing, and Topics. I've already got my choices picked out. I'd attend “Dealing With Black Holes in Your Subject's Life,” the “Role of Fiction in Biography,” “Dealing With Copyright, Fair Use, and Estate: Tips and Trapdoors,” and “What You Need to Know About E-Books.” The organizers have set up opportunities to participate in research workshops preceding the conference at the Library of Congress and the National Archives.

The National Press Club, Washington D.C.

If you're looking for a last minute holiday gift for the biographer in your family, how about a ticket to D.C.?

Click here to read more about The Compleat Biographer.



Advice to the Family Historian: Listen Well This Holiday Season

As many of us prepare for holiday get-togethers with relatives we don’t see frequently we have a great opportunity to gather family stories. But, in the hustle and bustle of the family gathering we have to make sure we’re really listening.  Here are a few thoughts that might help.

Writer and editor Brenda Ueland, in a wonderful book, Tell Me More: On the Fine Art of Listening, called “… listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force.” She explained, “This is the reason: When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life. You know how if a person laughs at your jokes you become funnier and funnier, and if he does not, every tiny little joke in you weazens up and dies. Well, that is the principle of it. It makes people happy and free when they are listened to. And if you are a listener, it is the secret of having a good time in society (because everybody around you becomes lively and interesting), of comforting people, of doing them good.”

What makes for good listening? Nancy Kline author of Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind offers some simple suggestions:

“Adopt this attitude and general behavior as you listen:

• Settle back
• Keep your eyes on the eyes of the person as they speak
• Cultivate fascination with what they will say next
• Achieve a composure that is wildly dynamic
• Do not interrupt
• Trust that not uttering a word is one of the most effective things you can do
• Know that your job is to help the person think for themself, not to think for them
• Remember that the expression of feelings is often part of the thinking process
• Be aware that much of what they say will be a result of your effect on them

When we listen attentively, says Kline, “In the quiet presence of your attention, respect and ease, important things can happen for the person thinking. Fresh ideas can emerge; confusion can dissipate; painful feelings can subside; creativity can explode.”

So, when you sit down with relatives this holiday season, listen well. I’ll bet you are rewarded with some great stories.

Gather Stories of Ancestors With a Family Blog

We are always on the lookout for ways to collect family stories. Anyone who has attended one of our workshops or seminars (or read this blog for that matter) knows that we believe stories are the key to writing an interesting family history book. But the best stories aren’t always easy to find and family members we ask to share those they know aren’t always as forthcoming as we might wish. Hence our interest in how to collect those illusive pieces of family lore.

The high tech website Mashable recently described a story catching tool called Storify which will allow the user to,” Pull together content from social networks to create a cohesive story with tweets, posts, photos and videos that maintain their original functionality.” Interesting idea, but maybe not the one most family historians I know are looking for.

A friend passed along a newspaper magazine insert, American Profile, which offered an idea that relies on a more traditional kind of social networking. Stephanie Vozza suggests creating a family blog. This is not necessarily the family history blog that most people in hot pursuit of a missing ancestor might think of. It’s not about gathering data or documenting facts. It’s about keeping in touch.

A generation or two ago keeping in touch wasn’t an issue for most of us. Extended families often lived within relative close proximity to each other. People kept in touch over Sunday dinner at grandma’s house. But with relatives spread all over the map today conversations that were a matter of course don’t just happen anymore.

Vozza describes the experience of Jayne Jaudon Ferrer of Greenville, South Carolina who started a blog to which she encouraged family members to submit. Many family members have, she says, contributing recipes, movie reviews and prayer requests. “It’s a wonderful and easy way to stay in touch with loved ones that we may not get to see in person for years at a time,” says Ferrer.

What’s of interest to a family historian seeking to gather stories of ancestors was something Ferrer didn’t anticipate when she started her blog. People began conversations. They shared recollections. “We also post memories of relatives long gone,” says Ferrer, “big family gatherings that happened back when most of the original family members – our grandmother and her eight children were still alive, and family stories that have been passed on down.”

The kinds of stories that might be shared on this kind of blog are exactly the ones that will bring ancestors to life in a family history book. Give it a try for your family.

Click here to read Mashable “Use Social Media to Tell Interactive Stories

Click here to read Stephanie Vozza’s article “Creating a Family Blog” in American Profile



Factual Family History - What Gets Lost?

Novelist Suzanne Berne’s new book Missing Lucile chronicles her search for meaning in her family’s history.

The experience is one that is not unfamiliar to genealogists and family historians. It might also be a cautionary tale they would be well to examine.

At the heart is her grandmother, Lucile, who died of cancer in her early forties. However, her father, a very young boy at the time, always believed that his mother had abandoned him. He said, “We were told she was gone. No one ever said where.”

Berne decides that her missing grandmother is "the Rosetta stone by which all subsequent family guilt and unhappiness could be decoded.” She sets out to unlock the family secrets by discovering what she can about Lucile’s story.

The result leads Julie Myerson, British novelist, columnist for the Financial Times and book reviewer for the BBC2’s Newsnight Review, to comment in her New York Times Book Review, “…this is my kind of book. Why, then, did I find it so arduous?”

The answer lies in Berne’s decision to tell the story not as a novelist but as a journalist or historian might do it. She commits herself to creating a factual account of the family’s history. She does imagine what might have happened or have been said, on occasions where all of the facts can’t be discovered. But each time, she stops the narrative to tell her reader what she’s doing.

The string of cautions and qualifiers leads Myerson to say, “I began to dread the sight of another lumpen passage dotted with Berne’s increasingly repetitive what-ifs and perhapses.”

That’s too bad. There is another way.

As Myerson commented, “Berne has said that she originally thought of writing her grandmother’s life as a novel, and you can see why. She’s a first-rate fiction writer, and the passages where she quits her detective-style ruminating and allows herself to bounce off on some imaginative tangent are by far the most vivid and successful in the book. Skies and flowers burst to life. History turns from black and white into Techni­color. You can smell the air, feel the breeze on your cheek. People have conversations that sound credible and alive. Who cares if they didn’t happen exactly as they’re written?”

This is a lesson for family historians. Family history is not academic history. The goal is to bring ancestors to life, and draw the reader into your book, by telling their stories. The factual record may not tell a person’s whole story. It’s incomplete, with gaps that can only be filled by using inference and imagination to round out the story. That process is the basis for a relatively new literary genre - creative non-fiction.

We can see the genre as it has been employed by masters in books like Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, Joyce Carol Oates’ On Boxing and George Plimpton’s Paper Lion.

Lee Gutkind, author and professor at Arizona State University, who Vanity Fair dubbed “the Godfather” of the creative non-fiction movement explains, “Although it sounds a bit affected and presumptuous, “creative nonfiction” precisely describes what the form is all about. The word ‘creative’ refers simply to the use of literary craft in presenting nonfiction—that is, factually accurate prose about real people and events—in a compelling, vivid manner. To put it another way, creative nonfiction writers do not make things up; they make ideas and information that already exist more interesting and, often, more accessible.”

When you write your own family history consider employing the techniques of creative non-fiction to tell your family’s stories. It will make the experience for your readers much more lively and interesting than relying only on what can be drawn from the facts. You can preserve the documentation by listing source material for the factual record in an appendix, for those who want to read it.

Click here to read Julie Myerson’s review of Missing Lucile.

Click here to read Lee Gutkind’s article What is Creative Non-Fiction?



Organizing a Family History - BYU Ancestors

If you’ve been following our recent posts (or even if you haven’t) we have been looking at how to organize a family history book. The Brigham Young University TV series Ancestors offers some good insights on the subject. The website for the series which first aired in 1997 addresses several questions you’ll want to think about as you decide how to organize your book.

• What type of history do you want to create?
• How many people or generations should you include?
• Who is your intended audience?
• What style will you use? This section focuses on decisions about chronological or topical organization or combinations of the two. It also offers video clips which explain some of the choices you will face in organizing your family history.
• Do you need an index or source citations?

The website offers a variety of resources for family historians. It’s worth a look.

 Click here to visit the BYU Ancestors site.

Family Facts in Historical Context

People who want to create family history books often tell us that while the have done lots of factual research they have only a few family stories. What, they ask, can I do?

One of the ways to bring facts to life is to surround them with a historical context. If you don’t know many interesting details about your ancestor, try to find out what was going at the time and place where they lived.

You know that your family moved from Oklahoma to California in 1933, but the stories of their decision to leave Oklahoma and of their journey west have been lost. But there’s plenty of historical accounts of life in Dust Bowl Oklahoma and the migration of Okies to California. You could give your reader a sense of your ancestors experience by drawing upon stories told by people like them. You could make very effective use of literary passages like those in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

You could use political events associated with a time and place in the same way to suggest what life for your ancestors was like. Nancy Hendrickson, a Contributing Editor of Family Tree Magazine provides an excellent example of how it’s done. You have only an isolated fact to work with. In Hendrickson’s example, “My family was included in the Putnam County, Missouri, 1860 federal census.” Here’s how she puts that single fact into a rich historical context:

In the fall of 1860, an Assistant U.S. Marshal traveled the rolling green hills of Putnam County, Missouri, questioning the people in every household.  He asked their names and ages, occupation and birth place.  As an agent of the Secretary of the Interior, he was charged with the responsibility of taking the Eighth U.S. Federal Census.  He was called the enumerator.                                                                                             As he traveled the county, he probably got an earful of local politics—after all, the presidential election was only weeks away and with the South’s threat to leave the Union  should Lincoln be elected, secession talk had to be in the wind.  That, and the institution that James Russell Lowell called “the relic of a bygone world”—slavery.                                                                                                                                                    In this census year, a separate enumeration called a Slave Schedule, was also taken. This would be the last time in the country’s history that slaves would be counted.

The context makes the fact read like a story and helps us to understand the world in which the people listed in that census lived. It’s a way to help your reader share the experiences of the ancestors who people your book.

Whose Memoir is This Anyway?

So you’re concerned that your siblings have a different recollection of your family’s history than the one you want to put in your book. Your concern is not unique.

A melodrama of competing versions of a personal history is being played out today in the family of Ernest Hemmingway.

When Hemmingway committed suicide in 1961 his memoir, A Moveable Feast, was unfinished. Mary Hemmingway, his fourth wife reviewed the unfinished material with an editor from Scribner’s and assembled a book which was published in 1964.  

Fast forward forty-five years. Hemmingway’s son, Patrick, succeeded Mary Hemmingway who had passed away as his father’s literary executor.

"I thought the original edition was just terrible about my mother," said Patrick. Mary Hemmingway had been the fourth Mrs. Hemmingway. Patrick’s mother was Pauline Pfeiffer, the second Mrs. Hemmingway. His concern was with the way the affair between Pauline and Hemmingway broke up his first marriage to Hadley Richardson.

So Patrick set out to create a revised edition. Patrick’s son, Sean, served as editor for the new version. Ernest Hemmingway had written several versions of his book and saved all the drafts. The new edition makes use of versions that Mary Hemmingway had ignored in the first edition.

In his notebooks Ernest Hemmingway had also said that the book was a work of fiction although conceding that fiction often contains true stories.

Robert Fulford summed the situation up in Canada’s National Post online. He wrote, “So Hemingway revised reality as he half-remembered it, and Mary selected from his versions the material she wanted, and Sean made some different decisions. The 2009 book turned out to be a revision of a revision of a revision.”

Your memoir or family history may never satisfy all of the members of your family. They may have their own memories of the events. If they want to share their version with others, they can write their own book. As for you, you might best be guided by novelist Gore Vidal’s comment on his own memoir, “a memoir is how one remembers one’s own life.”



The Family Historian's Dilemma

In a recent Matilda Butler, who along with Kendra Bonnet, blogs at Women’s Memoirs discussed an insight about family history she had while visiting the Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California.

Said Butler:

 I stood watching a video of interviews with workers who have contributed to the growth of Salinas over the past 100 years. I was struck by what was missing. One person described how his family, his grandparents, moved from the Philippines to Hawaii and then on to California. He said he didn’t know why they didn’t stay in Hawaii, he just knew that they moved to California several years before his father was born. Another man spoke about his parents leaving Italy for California. He didn’t know the year they moved to Salinas. The stories continued in this vein. It was interesting to see how many cultures have made a contribution to the farming in Salinas, but none of these descendants knew the details. They didn’t know what motivated their families to move or when they moved or what they found when they arrived or why they stayed.

 It was an eloquent statement of a dilemma faced by many family historians. While genealogical details of their family trees are complete, the stories of the people who inhabit its branches have been lost. A number of the conversations Nancy and I had with people at the Salt Lake Family History Expo focused on trying to find lost stories of ancestors.

What is clear is that the longer you wait to get your family history started, the more likely it is this will happen to you. If you followed Nancy’s series on story recording over the last few days, you have some excellent guides to help you in gathering your family’s stories. [If you haven’t yet seen the series, take a look at our last four posts.] But whatever you do, talk with relatives to gather the stories they have and make sure they are preserved.

You may wait to start your family history book, but don’t wait to gather the stories that will make it interesting and memorable for your readers when you do get it done.

To read Matilda Butler's full post, click here.



Gathering Family Stories: When, Who, Why, How

Gathering your family stories is a different kind of research. They are rarely found in books, in libraries, or online. Genealogical records can only hint at the rich truths in the lives our ancestors have lived. This is just another reason why we, who live now, are so fortunate. Even though much may never be known, we can leave a far more detailed record of what we do know for our descendants.

Stories are always the greatest challenge to acquire, as are all rare and valuable treasures. This is because they are stored in human memory, and communicated in the context of a relationship. Memories, and relationships, can be faulty and limited. Moreover, many family historians use a hit-or-miss approach to gathering these stories. If they do not feel confident, they are less likely to preserve and publish the stories they do know.

I often hear miraculous tales about people who chanced on a fantastic family story, entirely by coincidence. What joy they feel as they retell that odd tale! Already, though, there is a chance of details slipping away, lost between successive tellers. All the more reason to preserve and publish family stories, while they are available and fresh.

The obvious, common obstacles are time, distance, and simply knowing what to do. (I’ll save dealing with recalcitrant relatives for a whole other article.) Assuming you are willing to give some time to your family history, prioritize your story gathering with my favorite adage “living things first”. Facts already preserved in a book may wait, but 85-year old Aunt Ida may not be around that much longer. Make a list of all the living people who are repositories of family knowledge, and go after them!

But the distance is the problem, you say? No worries. Telephone conversations can be recorded. There is even video chat, if your interview would go better face-to-face, and you can often find some young person on the far end to facilitate the technology. Recording truly is the way to go. It simply is too much to ask someone else to write on your behalf. It never seems to get done, and you can alienate your subject when you ask for the impossible.

Instead, make a list of what you want most from each individual, and charm their stories from them. How? If you can, visit in person and bring a small, thoughtful gift related to your family history. Come prepared to ask just a few questions (and hope to come back later with more.) Start with facts that aren’t threatening, just reestablishing the public record. Ask your subject what he or she thinks is important to be preserved, before sharing what you think is important. You may elicit more treasures simply by listening without revealing a detailed agenda. Don’t stand in the way of the stories by interacting too much, or you will wind up with a recording of yourself. Encourage monologues, and nod a lot.

Let’s assume you visit a number of relatives, and you’ve recorded all those sessions. What now? You must separate the wheat from the chaff. I use an excellent audio editing program you can download free, Audacity. Keep the originals, and listen to a copy, erasing the chitchat and preserving the history. Then it’s just a matter of sending your audio to a transcriptionist, and voilà! You have not-so-instant written family stories for your book. It really is easier than you think.

We’re at the Salt Lake Family History Expo at the South Towne Expo Center in Sandy, Utah this weekend. Come by and see us to learn more.



The Best Way to Preserve Family History Research

After a wonderful weekend at the Midwest Family History Expo in Kansas City, I was once again reminded of how much genealogists love research. Me too! But I also found myself having numerous conversations with people about what to do with their research.

 Donna Przecha offered some good advice to family history researchers in her article From Planning to Printing: Your Family in Print on Genealogy.com. She said, “Devoted genealogists love going through their many collections of family group sheets, boxes of photographs, copies of census reports, notes from all sources and the ubiquitous photocopies of relevant pages of books. To us these are the building blocks of history — our personal history. However, if you want to get the attention of your children, your cousins, other people with the same surnames or even other genealogists, you have to present your material in a more concise and logical manner.”

 

Her conclusion was exactly the one we had been discussing at the Expo, “…the most efficient and logical way for most people is in a book…” I was happy to see that Przecha went on to advise people to, “Try not to make your book a recitation of names, dates and places. Add as much story as you possibly can.”

 The other thing we frequently discussed with Expo visitors was limiting the scope of the book they wanted to create. A lifetime of research is often more than a single volume can reasonably contain. Deciding to limit a book to one line of the family or deciding on a chronological limit, the family’s arrival in the U.S. or the Civil War, or deciding to include three generations can all allow you to work with a manageable amount of material to include in your book.

Click her to see Donna Przecha’s complete article.