Telling your story

Writing your memoirs, creating a family history, leaving lessons learned

Storycatching, life telling, life writing
(visually, orally, in print, audio, video)
capturing a life story and life lessons for future generations
Do it yourself or hire a personal historian (your memoir ghostwriter) to help!

• Getting started
• Links to good interview questions
• Video tributes and documentaries
• Sources for music, images, video clips and related material
• Finding background music for video biographies, podcasts, presentations, etc.
• Finding vintage music from a particular year or place
• Finding photos and other images
  
• Preserving your family treasures (archiving, conservation, and preservation)

• Timelines, family history, genealogical and other historical resources
• Doing oral histories or video interviews
• Oral history collections online
• Audio recording and editing equipment, software, tools and tutorials for recording and editing interviews
• Books to help you get started writing your own (or someone else's) life story
• Books for life story writing or reminiscence groups
• Personal historians help others tell their life stories
• Selection from Starting Over, by Herman Sheets with Pat McNees
• Selections from the memoirs of Dr. Thomas McNair Scott, pediatrician
• Obituaries and obit writing

Everyone has a story to tell but many of us need help telling it — or finding the time to record, collect, and edit the stories of other family members. Once we overcome shyness or modesty, however, we almost all enjoy reminiscing. As the years advance, a "life review" is particularly rewarding, but at any age it can be a great pleasure and an amazing source of insights. If you're one of the younger members of your family, take my word for it: You may not be eager to hear family stories now, but eventually you will.

Get those stories now — before memories fade, and while people are still alive. If nothing else, get those stories recorded — you can decide later whether you want to do something more formal and coherent. Having those voices on tape, having the stories behind those photographs preserved, is a far more meaningful legacy in the long term than most other physical legacies. And in the short term the material can enliven a special occasion, such as a major anniversary, birthday, or memorial service. Indeed, one way to improve the care an elderly patient receives in a hospital or nursing home is to write a brief history of their life and tape it to the door, making them a person with a story and not just another old patient.

An experienced interviewer with a good tape recorder can capture memories that your family will cherish for generations. (Most people find the prospect of writing about their life daunting — and fail to write in their real “voice.” Taping your stories can be a first step toward helping you “write” your own story.) If someone in your family has stories to tell, and can't tell them on their own, encourage them to work with an interviewer. If they don’t know where to begin, bring out a box of old family photos, and have them tell stories about the days those photos were taken. Start with a family photo history, with captions! Make a CD of it for everyone in the family. Do it NOW! Don't put it off to the distant future. So often I hear people express regret about the stories they didn't get and wish they had now. Keep it simple, but do it now!

As a professional journalist with great curiosity about the lives of others, I've helped research and write several personal, family, and organizational histories. What can you expect when you hire someone to help you with all or part of yours? In general, we conduct interviews, have the interviews transcribed, organize and edit the material, help you find your "voice" (if you're telling the story in your own voice), and generally help you capture the essence of your life story. Everyone has a story to tell, but not everyone realizes how their life might interest others, especially in their own family — or field. I am often hired by someone to capture the life story of a loved one. And it needn't be one person telling the story. Sometimes when stars in the family story were raised in the "never toot your own horn" tradition, I get others in the family (or the company, or the field) to tell part of their story. Nothing is more boring than mere bragging: you want to know exactly WHY they were the greatest, and you also want to know about their foibles, which are often best (most amusingly) told by others. (It's just as interesting to hear that Grandpa, the successful businessman, habitually pocketed sugar packets from the restaurant as it is to hear that he spoke at banquets, and such details make his portrait more human.)

The process of the life review is invariably therapeutic, especially for the elderly, and getting that life story recorded (however humble or fancy the package) is a wonderful gift to the next generation, and to the generations after that. A life story needn't be an ambitious project and can proceed in stages. You can start with interviews: Get those memories on tape while the memories are still there to be captured. Get an elder to identify and tell stories about the people in those old photos. You can decide later if you want those interviews organized, edited, and transformed into a more polished manuscript and printed as a book. Or start by writing, and if writing is a chore, work with a writing coach or a personal historian--they can give you assignments and help you if you get stuck, or you can sit at a computer and write together, with them helping you remember and interpret what went on in your life.
(* "Saving lives, one story at a time," is a slogan of the Association of Personal Historians, of which I am president (2010-2011).)

TIP: Start with a timeline, a chronology. List all the important and not-so-important-but-memorable things that happened in the life of the person you are writing about. Use timelines like those I've provided links to, to help trigger memories. Looking through old photographs and memorabilia also helps trigger memories. See useful links below, in fairly random order.

Ordinary people, extraordinary lives

As a professional writer, I have helped many ordinary people remember important life events, and find the shape of their life story, usually at the behest of someone else in the family. The first gentleman whose life story I helped tell was an Ohio businessman in his late 80s, Warren Webster. Webster had lost both legs to diabetes, had lost his wife after 70 years of marriage, and was understandably depressed. He had retired from what he considered to be a modest career in manufacturing and was puzzled why anyone would want his life story, but telling it transformed him — brought the sparkle back to his eyes, made him feel as important as the family knew he was. As I wrote a story based on his interviews, I read it aloud to him, as his vision was failing. Webster was a factory worker who rose to the executive suite. When I read aloud, “Webster decided that a life with dirty fingernails was not for him,” he said, “You can quit right there. That’s the whole story.” But there was much more: The story of his career reflected changes in American culture and in the transportation industry in the twentieth century, the chapter about his wife Mary's decades-long struggle with bipolar disorder offered a glimpse of American attitudes toward mental illness in midcentury, and his story was ultimately published as a book, An American Biography,for sale on Amazon.com. It became a wonderful memorial to his life.

Life stories needn’t be so ambitious. I am working now on a photohistory of a family that fled to California from Kansas in the dustbowl and Depression of the 1930s. Most life stories are created mostly for the family — for the generations to come in a particular family — but could well become valuable to future historians, as I hope this one will be.

Equally important to history, I think, are the memoirs of Dr. Thomas McNair Scott. I spent many hours interviewing Tom with a view to helping him write his memoirs, for private publication for his family and friends. A delightful man with great curiosity and (I learned from his former colleagues) a gift for diagnosis, Tom had become a pediatrician early in the twentieth century, when pediatrics was just becoming a field in America; it wasn't yet a field in England. Tom had a long, illustrious career teaching and practicing at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and elsewhere, and a long and happy marriage to Dwight McNair Scott, who did biomedical research. At the request (and with the help of) his children, Tom finished his memoirs shortly before his hundredth birthday, not long before his death (see excerpts below).

After the Wars. Chicago Public Radio's weekly series of short radio stories and images of America's veterans--a Points of View Production by Paul and Ben Calhoun, ed. by Cate Cahan. Click on image to hear vet's story.

• After the Wars. Chicago Public Radio's weekly series of short radio stories and images of America's veterans--a Points of View Production by Paul and Ben Calhoun, ed. by Cate Cahan. Click on image to hear vet's story.
• Aha moment: (Mutual of Omaha's delightful short videos on "defining moments" in people's lives, where they gained real wisdom)
• Aha Moments: I want my story to be told (part of a delightful Mutual of Omaha series)
• All About Me: Memoir Week at Slate (sixteen pieces on memoirs and memoir writing)
• Alzheimer's: Mementos help preserve memories (Mayo Clinic)
• A Mother's Farewell (Joanne Fowler, People's Magazine, 12-4-06. At 50 and facing terminal cancer, Pam Fairmont made a video for her 10-year-old son Connor. Her message: 'I'll always be with you.'
• Anecdote (Australia, "Putting stories to work") offers a free download of Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles (PDF, a practical guide to facilitating storytelling and story listening). A blog entry criticizing a Steve Denning video about radical management for not telling stories also offers a Storytest to see if you can spot a story. Good site for insights into storytelling for businesses.
• Animated StoryCorps shorts (series includes a conversation between a boy with Asperger's syndrome and his mom as well as two Brooklyn characters remembering how they fell in love and learning how to let go)
• Association of Personal Historians (APH, The Life Story People. "Saving lives — one story at a time"). (Confession: I was president of APH, 2010-2011)
• The Art of Listening (Henning Mankel, NYTimes Opinion 12-11-11, on what the West can learn from the African storytelling tradition. Contains a sentence that is hard to top: “That’s not a good way to die — before you’ve told the end of your story.”)
• Audio and video recording equipment, software, and editing tools -- reviews, tutorials, and explanations

• Back to the Future. Photographer Irina Werning's wonderful pairings of old photos and later variations (adult reenactments). A marvelous variation on personal history.
• Be a Family Historian (Rick Shriver, Zanesville Times Recorder 12-11-11)

• Before I Die an abandoned house is transformed into a giant chalkboard, so residents can write on the wall, remembering what's important to them -- a brilliant combination of street art, personal expression, and messaging, created by Candy Chang. Check out her other projects.
• The best Christmas gift--a life story (Patrick T. Reardon, Chicago Tribune, 12-10-11). The gifts he's treasured most have been the autobiographies his wife and kids wrote for him at his request.
***The Best Present Ever (this video from My Special Book, a lovably productive Argentinean firm, shows how someone feels when the family puts together a tribute book. Watch their delighted and happy expressions. This is why personal historians love their work.)
• Beyond the Valley of the Doilies,Joy Press on Jessica Helfland, the billion-dollar scrapbooking industry, and what scrapbooking is all about (Salon.com)
• The biography business by Louis Menand, a review of Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject by Meryle Secrest and Biography: A Brief History by Nigel Hamilton, and an interesting discussion, in the New Yorker (8-6-07)
• A bridge to the past: Personal historian helps tell stories (Jacob Livingston, Spokesman Review, 2-7-10, on the advantages and experience of hiring a personal historian)
• The Business of Lives: Why People Are Turning to Professionals To Preserve their Life Stories (David Maloof, excerpts from Hampshire Life, Daily Hampshire Gazette 8-27-99)
• The Business of Memory: Families want to preserve their life stories (Ilana DeBare, San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, 8-20-06)
• But Enough About Me What does the popularity of memoirs tell us about ourselves? Daniel Mendelsohn's review of Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History (New Yorker,1-25-2010)
• Butler Reviews Life Review (Robert N. Butler, in Aging Today newsletter, 2000): "Life review, a normal developmental task of the later years, is characterized by the return of memories and past conflicts. Life review can result in resolution, reconciliation, atonement, integration and serenity. It can occur spontaneously, or it can be structured. Reminiscence, simply recalling events or periods of one's life, is only one aspect of a life review; although it can be therapeutic, it is usually not evaluative."
• Cantor has one more lesson to share with his bar and bat mitzvah students: a personal look at the Holocaust (John Barry, St. Petersburg Times, 11-25-09)
• Can We Tape? A Practical Guide to Taping Phone Calls and In-Person Conversations in the 50 States and D.C. (with a state-by-state guide). (Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Fall 2008)
• Capturing seniors' stories while she still can by David Ball (Herald Tribune, 2-10-2010). Check out the box, Words to the Wise. "Obviously, none of us live forever," said Wade Matthews, 76, a retired diplomat, avid birder and head of the Sarasota chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "We'd all like to see a little bit of the things we think are worthwhile passed on, partly for the historical record and partly for the hope that some of these ideas might be adopted by other people."
• Christmas letters, 10 writing tips (ChristmasLettersTips.com)
• Circular Biography. This Book World review of Mary Gordon's Circling My Mother suggests approaching a life story from various unreconciled angles)
• A comparison of print and video legacy memoirs (personal historian Andrea Gross explains their suitability for different purposes)
• Coming-of-age memoirs (a recommended-reading list)
• A convert to family history . (BBC News, A Point of View 12-2-11). The discovery of a tape recording shed light on a puzzling family photograph which was taken in 1906 - and changed historian Lisa Jardine's views about the genealogy boom. "What a thrill, then, to encounter the miracle of oral history - of having a person in front of you who was actually there."
• Creating a legacy for someone nearing death improves communication (results of a research study)
• The Daily Digi, devoted to digital scrapbooking (for do-it-yourselfers), has how-to articles, such as Planning an Album or Photobook and Printing Photobooks and Albums for Scrapbookers, by Liz of Paislee Press and Audrey Neal of Audacious Designs
• Dawn Thurston's advice for writing your memoirs(when you're not a professional writer)
• Dear Photograph (take a picture of a picture from the past in the present--delightful!)
• 'Dignity therapy' gives comfort to dying patients. Helping terminally ill patients pass on their final thoughts may help give them a better quality of life, reports Harvey Chochinov, head of a Canadian research study (Jonathan Shorman, USA Today 7-11-11, on study published in Lancet Oncology)
• Dignity Therapy. For the Dying, A Chance to Rewrite Life (Alix Spiegel, Morning Edition, NPR 9-12-11). Listen or read transcript.
• Do History (a site that shows you how to piece together the past from fragments that have survived, with a case study of Martha Ballard)
• Don't let big-mouthed relatives bury your family history (Larry Lehmer's Pass It On blog)

• Easing Into Memoirs (Kathryn Gullo, Scholastic, Write It Teacher Center, on teaching memoir-writing to children--perhaps equally helpful to adults)
• Everyone has a memoir in them Elizabeth FloydMair, StarTribune, 8-12-11). "Marion Roach Smith recommends keeping details specific and seeing what happens if you write about big events obliquely, looking at them sidelong rather than straight on. She writes that in most cases she'd rather read an essay about dressing for a funeral than about sitting there listening to the eulogy."
• Everyone Has a Story to Tell:To write a memoir, cultivate the habit of listening to yourself. (Abigail Thomas, AARP, July 2008)
• A Facebook story: A mother's joy and a family's sorrow. Ian Shapira, Washington Post, has edited and annotated Shana Greatman Swers Facebook page to tell her story from pre-baby date nights to a medical odyssey that turned the ecstasy of childbirth into a struggle for life.
• Face to Facebook with the Past. Erika Schickel (L.A. Times opinion page) on reconnecting in cyberspace with high school friends whose memories of facts and events threaten to pollute our personal storyline.
• Fathers - invest in your past for your kids (Bob Brody, San Francisco Chronicle 6-18-11). Keep a journal about your kids' lives, suggests Brody, who is doing so. "In the process, you'll leave your children (or grandchildren) a keepsake even more precious than your wedding ring, an heirloom as valuable in its own right as your house, a tangible, heartfelt legacy for the next generation vastly better than any insurance policy." Brody blogs at Letters to My Kids.
• The Father You Choose: Denial or deification? Remembering a roguish desert rat (Adair Lara, San Francisco Chronicle 6-13-04)
• First Person Festival of Memoir and Documentary Art (Philadelphia, annual event)
• 5,000 residents of 'dying city' Grand Rapids lip-dub song about the Day the Music Died (a/​k/​a The Grand Rapids Lip Dub -- a lively and moving 8.5-minute video that captures both the city and its community spirit --posted by Caryn Ganz 5-31-11 on YahooMusic)
• Frank McCourt and the American Memoir (Jennifer Schuessler, NYTimes, 7-25-09)
• For Better or for Worse comic strip about a personal photo history's value after memory loss (Lynn Johnston, strip ID 7564, date 2008-08-03, and strip ID 7470, 2006-10-15)
• For Dying People, A Chance To Shape Their Legacy (Julie Bierach, Weekend Edition, NPR, 4-9-11). Imagine that you've just been told you have only a short time to live. What would you want your family and community to remember most about you? In St. Louis, a hospice program called Lumina helps patients leave statements that go beyond a simple goodbye.
• Frequently asked questions about personal history work (APH, The Life Story People)

• From School Files of an Earlier Era (Susan Dominus on journalist/​collector Paul Lukas's rescue of a filing cabinet about to be thrown out, containing girls' school records from the 1910s to the 1930s, and what he did with them, NY Times 9-13-10)."What historical record detects is scattershot; we can hardly guess ourselves what elements of our lives will be of interest down the road, whether what seems significant now will go unobserved, be deemed irrelevant, or be too subtle for documents to detect."
• Future Elder Caregivers Should Learn Life Histories. The social work and history departments at the University of South Florida designed a project to introduce the concept of "person-centered care": Working with a class of 22 undergraduates, 23 participants from a residential facility for seniors shared their life stories in various ways (talking, creating a scrapbook, being videotaped for an oral history, etc.).
• A Future Without Personal History by Michael Moore-Jones, a sixteen-year-old who has never sent a letter, wonders what it will be like to have no letters documenting his life -- as his digital records disappear.
• German grandchildren of Nazis delve into past (Kirsten Grieshaber,Associated Press 5-14-11).
• Getting Personal: An estate plan should include stocks, bonds — and a life story (Ed McCarthy, Wealth Manager magazine, 5-1-07)
• Give someone (yourself, maybe?) the gift of a personal historian, to help with your life story (Association of Personal Historians)
• Grandma Taught Our Son a Lot (Diane J. Strickland, Globe & Mail, on the value of cross-generational life story telling)
• Great interview questions (scripts for interviewing members of your family)
• Growing Up and Old in the Same Little Neighborhood (Manny Fernandez, NYTimes, 1-11-11) tells one of 8 million stories in the Naked City, this one of John Maloney, who stayed put in his neighborhood of Windsor Terrace, in Brooklyn.
• Grub Street Memoir Project (Boston)
• Guided Autobiograph workshops, developed by James Birrens, now taught in person and online. Write the story of your life -- two pages at a time. I took Cheryl and Anita's trainer instruction course online and was surprised to find myself bonding with the other participants. We still meet online periodically.

• Harry Lamin's letters from World War I, a blog on which letters from an English soldier are posted by his grandson exactly 90 years after they were written; now the son has died and the grandson has taken over, but there are also links to new blogs that this one inspired. Maybe it will be a model for someone you know!
• The health benefits of storytelling for the elderly (Jane Oppermann, Chicago Daily Herald). This is a placeholder, as the link no longer works. Calling Jane Oppermann: is the story available elsewhere?
• The heart and craft of lifestory writing (Sharon Lippincott's blog--and check her blogroll for more of the same)
• Heirloom that survived the Nazis (Charlotte Sutton, St. Petersburg Times, conveys a family's story of survival in a story about a piece of furniture)
• Her blueprint for change by Subash Jeyan (The Hindu 8-6-11). Nothing can be started if one decides that the task is mammoth and it cannot be taken up, says author and researcher C.S. Lakshmi who founded SPARROW to archive women's lives, their history and struggles. (Sparrow is a sound and picture archive for research on women --archiving print, oral history, and pictorial material)
• Homecoming II (Henrietta Rose-Innes on the quiet secrets of her Cape Town home, Granta)
• Helpers can jog your memoirs . Can't find the words, or the time, to record your life story? You can hire a ghostwriter or scrapbook artist to do the hard work for you. (Dianna Marder, Philadelphia Inquirer, philly.com 11-12-04, on your life, by personal historians)
• Home Movie Day (an annual celebration of amateur films and filmmaking)
• How memoirs took over the literary world (Laura Miller, Salon.com, reviewing Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History)
• How to Become Your Company's Storyteller (Jennifer Wang, Entrepreneur, 1-10-12). A company can position itself against giant competitors through storytelling. "A lot of business owners fall in love with their own product and forget that other people need to be romanced by a story," Bisceglia says. "A brand should make you feel something when you say the name. Without context, it's just stuff."
• How to Collect Your Own Family Folklore (guide from Smithsonian Office of Folklife Programs), including Sample Interview Questions
• How to Do Your Own Life Review (video of Jane Fonda, 2 minutes, on Oprah show)
• How to Write a Memoir: Be yourself, speak freely, and think small (William Zinsser, American Scholar, Spring 2006)
• How to Write Memoirs (BBC website)
• * How to Write Your Memoir (Joe Kita, Reader's Digest -- slow-loading, but worth it)
• Huge 'Legacy Gaps' In Baby Boomers' and Parents' Views of Inheritance (Allianz study)

• The Implications of plot lines in narrative and memoir. Victoria Costello's essay on storytelling approaches to illness narratives (Nieman StoryBoard 7-11-11). Costello (the author of A Lethal Inheritance: A Mother Uncovers the Science Behind Three Generations of Mental Illness ) writes about illness narrative as an interactive experience, and about three common plotlines: the restitution narrative, the chaos narrative, and the quest narrative.
• "I'm so glad you did this. So glad." (Susan A. Kitchens, Family Oral History, on how a casual recording of a conversation was transformed, by death, "into something of unspeakable value")
• In memoirs, varieties of truth (William Loizeaux, Christian Science Monitor, 2-8-06, writing "If the critical elements of a first-person narrative arise from conjecture, informed imagination, or imagination that contradicts known fact, then you better call it fiction....The line that should be most closely tended is the line of trust between writer and reader."
• Interview with personal historian Stephanie Kadel Taras (audiofile) on Ann Arbor program "Everything Elderly," about what a personal historian does,and why, and what you might get if you hire her. (Each personal historian is different.) Here's the program description.
• Ira Glass on Storytelling (Wimp.com video)
• I Remember It Well, lyrics to the song from "Gigi" (Alan Jay Lerner /​ Frederick Loewe) as sung by Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold--capturing the different ways a couple may remember things.
• It's Not Just About You (Adam Hochschild, First Person Singular, Nieman Storyboard Digest, on making memoirs reader-oriented, not ego-oriented)

• Just Screw It: How I Told My Family I Was Writing About Our Feud Over the Sweet'n Low Fortune (Rich Cohen, Slate 3-29-07)
• Laugh, Kookaburra (David Sedaris, New Yorker, 8-24-09 -- an example of "show, not tell" about family relationships)
• Legacy letters (ethical wills)
• A Letter from Sendai (Anne Thomas, Ode, 3-14-11, on experiencing unexpected kindnesses and grace after (and between) earthquakes and aftershocks in Japan, 2011.
• The Letters of Others (Sofia E. Groopman, Harvard Crimson, 7-6-11). She's writing about researchers and famous people but what she says applies to personal projects as well.
• Life After Tim, by Janet Burroway (St. Petersburg Times), in which Burroway describes what she learned about grief after her son Tim Eysselinck, a former Ranger and Army captain, committed suicide after finishing work in Iraq.
• Life Savers: Capturing your family history is a phone call away. Mary Helen Tibbs (Memphis magazine, 4-07, PDF) hears about the "legacy videos" produced by husband-wife team Verissima Productions (Rob Cooper and Pam Pacelli).

• The Life Review Process in Later Adulthood, PhD dissertation by Linda M. Woolf (comparing the theories of Erik Erikson and Robert Butler, both of whom conclude that "a positive resolution of the life review results in a reorganization of the personality."

****The Life Report,. First "fascinating and addictive" life stories (prepare for a long read) posted after David Brooks asked, on the NY Times Op Ed page (10-27-11): If you are over 70... I’d like you to write a brief report on your life so far, an evaluation of what you did well, of what you did not so well and what you learned along the way." The first life reports were followed by Life Reports II (11-28-11).

• Life Savers: Capturing your family history is a phone call away. Mary Helen Tibbs (Memphis magazine, 4-07, PDF) hears about the "legacy videos" produced by husband-wife team Verissima Productions (Rob Cooper and Pam Pacelli).
• The life story business and market (links to stories about, Writers and Editors site)
• A Life Without Left Turns (Michael Gartner, USA Today, 6-15-06). A moving story that illustrates how a life (and a long, happy marriage) can be depicted through one theme --in this case, that this journalist's father chose early in life never to drive--to walk, or to be a passenger and navigator, instead)
• Lifewriting Basics (Telling HerStory, Story Circle Network)
• Listening--Really Listening and More on Listening by Susan Turnbull (Personal Legacy Advisors), with a link to Nancy Kline's "Generative Attention--Transformative Listening."
• Lives During Wartime (Home Fires Readers, NYTimes, American Veterans on the Post-War Life, launched 11-10-09)
• 'Living headstones' use technology to honor the dead (Susan Gilmore, Seattle Times 7-31-11). "Wave a smartphone over the bench-style headstone of Edouard Garneau at Holyrood Cemetery in Shoreline and you'll learn he was a collision-repair specialist and successful businessman who loved to barbecue, fly his airplane and travel." Technology brings digital 'lives' to the graveyard.
• Love Letters from 1912 (posted on Kirsten Transcribes website: Preserve. Honor. Document.

• Make History: The 9/​11 Museum (add your story to the collective telling of the events of September 11). Here's Steve Rosenbaum, with
• I've Got My 9/​11 Story. What's Yours? (his account of the filmed records he collected and donated)
• Mama Always Comes Home (Debbie Brodsky, Bethesda Magazine, 2-10, on creating a deployment video: a military mom's messages to her children)
• Mapping Memory in Spain project, part of effort to capture memories of Spain's Civil War and top confront the legacy of 40 years of Franco's dictatorship
• Memoirs and Memory, by Frank Bruni, author of Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-time Eater
• Memorial videos give lasting farewell (Jeff Strickler, StarTribune 6-6-11). Shortly before Connie Dunlap died in October, she sat in front of a camera focused in a tight close-up and talked about her faith and how it shaped her battle against cancer....Ken Kurita of Videon Productions teared up as he showed a video taken of his father, Dr. Kenji Kurita, who died in January. “This is all about life’s treasured moments,” Ken Kurita said.

• Memory Writers Network (essays about memoir writing, on Jerry Waxler's blog)
• The Me My Child Mustn't Know by Dani Shapiro (NY Times 7-14-11). Can a memoirist write with total honesty if she is worried about what her son might think? (The book Shapiro doesn't want her son to hear her read from is Slow Motion: A Memoir of a Life Rescued by Tragedy
• Merrill Memoirs keeps stories alive (Brenna McCabe, Valley Breeze 12-14-11)
• Metropolitan Diary: ‘Anything Goes’ on the Streets of New York (these particular diary entries are from the NY Times on 8-7-11; there is a collection of them here.
• Missing Christian Velten inspires life story books. British personal history firm launched after founder's brother disappears at age 28 (BBC News)
• Modernizing the ‘Kodak Moment’ as Social Sharing (Stuart Elliott, NY Times 4-25-10: 'Chief memory officer of the family' is the archetypal consumer in new Kodak ad.
• More retirees are self-publishing their memoirs as a family legacy (Lisa Fernandez, Bay Area Living, San Jose Mercury News 10-4-11).
• The Moth, , a nonprofit group that runs storytelling events in New York and Los Angeles
--Storytellers Finding Success on Stages Large and Small: Going Solo Gets Crowded by Alex Williams, NYTimes 8-14-09 --Songs of Themselves (Jim O'Grady, NYTimes, 11-14-08)
• A Mother's Farewell Joanne Fowler, People Magazine 12-4-06). At 50 and facing terminal cancer, Pam Fairmont made a video for her 10-year-old son Connor. Her message: 'I'll always be with you.'
• Mother's Day Special: Better than roses Want to do something really special for your mom this Mother's Day? Find out who she really is (Marylaine Block, My Word's Worth)
• My artobiography: From birth, to marriage, to her son's early death. How one woman chronicled her life in a series of sketches (Sabine Durrant, Daily Mail, 11-24-10. Ann Frewer's book, Life, the Greatest Privilege, makes a lovely gift.
• My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant (Jose Antonio Vargas, NY Times 6-22-2011)
• My Mother Was an Okie by Beth Lightfoot (a KitchenScraps story posted on Women's Memoirs)
• My Son, My Soldier, My Sorrow. (Janet Burroway, St. Petersburg Press 6-13-04). Three essays written over 20 years by a liberal, pacifist mother struggling to understand her conservative son, a proud soldier and member of the NRA
• My Turn: Saving a life, for those left behind (Jane Lehmann-Shafron, Los Angeles Times 12-12-11). "I have interviewed hundreds of people — most of them in their 70s and older. While I can't be sure that I have added any days to those lives, I am certain that, for my subjects and their families, helping tell their stories has saved their lives by creating a little piece of immortality.I do know that telling my dad's story helped preserve his life and gave new meaning to my own."
• My Words Are Gonna Linger: The Art of Personal History, ed. by Paula Yost and Pat McNees, with foreword by Rick Bragg. “At last, a collection that shows the ‘why, what, and how’ behind memoir as legacy.”~ Susan Wittig Albert, author of Writing from Life

• Narrative and healing(Aron S. Wolf, MD, on why telling your story is good for your health)
• Narrative medicine. Stories in Medicine: Doctors-in-Training Record a Different Type of Patient History (Margot Adler, NPR, 10-28-03)
• 93-year-old's WWII feats are hidden no longer (Torsten Ove, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 11-23-08, a personal story of heroism becomes social history)
• No other family's quite like yours, so capture its history (Andrea Gross, St Petersburg Times, 8-28-07). Those funny tales and memories needn't fade with time and distance.
• Not all the victims of Hitler died before he did. Mike Shatzkin, who blogs about publishing and digital change, posted this entry between engagements; it is a fascinating example of history made vivid through personal history.
• Not Quite What I Was Planning, NPR's delightful slideshow of images and text from the book Not Quite What I Was Planning:Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure, edited by Rachel Fershleisher and Larry Smith, based on the six-word memoirs from the storytelling magazine Smith.

• Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience (PBS Series, with clips from firsthand accounts of war by servicemen and women)
• Ordinary People (Chris Wright, Boston Phoenix 1-17-02). Memoirs used to be the territory of the famous, the intrepid, or the afflicted. Today, everyone's getting into the act, often with the help of a personal historian.
• Organizing and Preserving Your Heirloom Documents by Katherine Scott Sturdevant (how to safely collect, preserve, and publish diaries, memoirs, letters, papers, or memorabilia from your relatives and ancestors)
• Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes (OLLI) nationwide sponsor a lot of life story writing programs. Here are some stories posted by OLLI'sLife Story Center (Jennie Chin Hansen, James Birren, Sophie Freud)
• Our stories, ourselves (Sadie F. Dingfelder, Monitor on Psychology, American Psychological Association Jan 2011). The tales we tell hold powerful sway over our memories, behaviors and even identities, according to research from the burgeoning field of narrative psychology.
• The Oxford Project. Do check out these photos, and read about the project: Photo project gives voice to 'backbone of America' (Wayne Drash, CNN, 10-7-08, with video, photos, text)

• Passive Aggressive Note(folk humor in the digital age?)
• Personal History Productions. On the Aging Boomers Radio Show (Sonoma County), listen to personal historians Susan Milstein and Andi Reese Brady tell how they developed a business interviewing people about their lives and presenting them as audio CDs or beautiful bound books
• Photo album rescued from trash a trove of WWII African American life (Bonnie L. Cook, Philadelphia Inquirer, philly.com 1-30-12)
• PhotoBook Press (for heirloom-quality photobooks, made with archival paper and Smyth-sewn-signature bindings, which, unlike glued bindings, won't fall apart)
• Photo hosting websites (useful when a group is collecting and posting photos for a big project)
• Postcards from Yo Momma (a repository of modern-day maternal correspondence, sure to make you smile)
• Preserving Market Memories: Ann Arbor Farmers Market project records oral history (Rebecca Friedman, Ann Arbor Chronicle)
• Preserving Your Family History (Terri Scott, Bellaire Buzz, Nov 2011, interviewing Susan Farnsworth, owner of Susan's Concierge for Seniors, and video personal historian Stefani Twyford).
• Print on demand (POD), what you ought to know
• The Public Practice of History in and for a Digital Age (William Cronon, Perspectives on History, American Historical Association)

• Questions We Should All Ask Mom (Lisa Belkin, Motherlode blog, NY Times 5-6-09)
• Real estate video for restored 140-acre Wisconsin farm borrows personal history approach to make a property enticing.
• Recording family histories before it's too late (Rosemary McClure, LA Times, 12-19-09)
• Recording Your Story, (Logan Molineaux, Daily Herald, Utah). Very helpful for beginning personal historians and their clients.
Rediscovering WWII's female 'computers' (Jamie Gumbrecht, CNN, 2-8-11). This story of women secretly recruited during WWII to calculate weapons' trajectories for fighting U.S. troops is captured in the documentary Top Secret Rosies (on Vimeo).
• Reflections (excellent Novartis images)
• Researching family history has never been easier (7 on Your Side story: "It is a gift that will last generations."
• Re-membering Pets: Documenting the meaning of people’s relationships with these family members by narrative therapist Barbara Baumgartner, in Explorations: An E-Journal of Narrative Practice
• Remember this? A project to record everything we do in life (Alec Wilkinson,The New Yorker, 5-28-07, on "lifelogging")

• Sasha and Zamani, African proverb about the two stages of death. Steve Pender's blog entry about African concept that you are truly dead when you are no longer remembered. Stefani Twyford on the same story, both of them citing James Walsh, who spoke of the proverb/​concept at an APH conference.

• Save a Life…In a Story. Marcia Passos Duffy (SeniorJournal.com, 4-12-05, on becoming , a personal historian, after realizing she'd failed to capture her late mother's stories
Scanning old photos? Find useful info here on how to make a digital file of an old photograph: Scanning Basics 101 (Wayne Fulton's useful site), which includes useful pages such as this Scanning and Printing Resolution Calculator. Read up a little on how to do it (or hire someone who knows what they're doing).
• ScrapMoir (Bettyann Schmidt, guestblogger, Women's Memoirs, on scrapbooking around ordinary moments in life)
• The secrets buried under a family tree (Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe, 4-18-08)
• Secrets of Memoir panel (Video of panel discussion held 11-2-11 at NYU Bookstore, sponsored by National Book Critics Circle)
• Secrets of a Successful Interview (Valerie Holladay, Ancestry Magazine, 2-05)
• Self-Portrait in a Skewed Mirror by Carlin Flora (Psychology Today 1-1-06). You're more than the star and author of your own life story. You're also the spin master. How you tell your tale reveals whether you see yourself as victim or victor, even when your story veers from the life you lived.
• Self-Publishing and Print on Demand (what you need to know)
• Seniors record stories to preserve personal history. With notebooks, tape recorders, and video cameras, families are coaxing a lifetime of memories from beloved relatives. (Marilyn Gardner, Christian Science Monitor, 5-27-08)
• 6th graders create civil rights documentary (Doug Moore, Post-Dispatch, 2-1-11). History teachers everywhere: Read this story!
• Should You Worry About Data Rot? David Pogue, Pogue's Posts on Technology (3-26-09), writes about problems in deterioration, stickiness, poor storage quality, online storage sites going out of business overnight, technologies changing and equipment for reading data becoming obsolete. Enjoy the videos, but for preservation, consider the book.
• Soldier admits sneaking into Auschwitz during WWII Mike Collett-White (Reuters)‘My life depended on 50 cigarettes,’ 92-year-old says in interview about biography The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz: A True Story of World War II by Denis Avey with Rob Broomby
• Sound Portraits (radio documentaries, predecessor to StoryCorps). No longer active but you can listen to stories from the archives.
• Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One. (Ann Banks, My Turn, Newsweek.) Don't underestimate the power of storytelling. It got folks through the Depression. It can work now, too.
• Stories about patients in clinical research at NIH (many written by Pat McNees, author of Building Ten at Fifty
• Stories Waiting to Be Told (Mary Harrison, Teaching Tolerance, Perspective No. 18, Fall 2000). ESL teachers in a middle school in North Dakota give refugee students a chance to tell their stories of loss and violence, by giving them a place to feel safe and build trusting relationships.
• Storycatching guidelines, for storycatching with a circle of friends, based on Christina Baldwin's book, Storycatcher: Making Sense of Our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story

• Story Circle Network, an active organization for women with stories to tell. Among other activities, an annual storytelling contest
• Story Corps audio interviews. Host Michael Krasny, Forum, hosts hour-long show with David Isay, featuring ten compelling true stories told by ordinary people — history from the bottom up, as collected in Listening Is an Act of Love. Modeled on the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration (under FDR), StoryCorps engages Americans locally in oral history, archiving interviwes at the American Folklife Center (Library of Congress). See its list of focused initiatives, such as the National Teachers Initiative, the StoryCorps Griot (preserving the voices, experiences, and life stories of African Americans), and the Memory Loss Initiative.
• StoryCorps Animated Shorts. Here's an interview with Studs Terkel, for example.
• StoryCorps Do-It-Yourself Guide to Interviewing (PDF). Storycorps recording equipment is available for interviews done at home (see Rent a Storykit), but there is a waiting list.
• StoryCorps Historias (Cuenta tu historia, or, Capturing Stories of Latinos in U.S.)
• StoryCorps Memory Loss Initiative. Download free Commemorate, a toolkit to help preserve the memories of clients living with memory loss (6 PDF files, especially for caregivers in memory-loss care facilities)
• Storytellers help neighbors lower blood pressure (Mary Parker, Boston.com 1-24-11). Peer-to-peer storytelling may help African-Americans deal with high blood pressure, according to a new study.
• Sudbury company helps preserve family history (Carole LaMond, MetroWest Daily News, 1-3-11). Profile of personal historians Chris Wisniewski and Stephanie Nichols, showing how PHs help families preserve their memories, stories)

• Tell Me More: On the Fine Art of Listening by Brenda Ueland, from her book Strength to Your Sword Arm: Selected Writings
• Telling Your Story TV interview with APH member Deb Moore and client Robin Horder-Koop about doing a personal history (5-minute YouTube video, What's West online, 12-15-09)
• The Terkel Rules: Translating from speech to prose. Michael Lenehan's fascinating conversation with Studs Terkel on when and how much it is okay to cut and paste (rearrange) material from an interview to make it seem as if that's the way the interview subject said it.(Should also be read by all transcribers and personal historians.)(Chicago Reader, 10-31-08)
• These Stories Will Change Your Life (Andrea Gross, Newsweek, My Turn, 7-21-06. What hearing my family history taught me about my mother and father)
• This I Believe (Stefani Twyford, "I believe in the power of the family story," Houston Public Radio, 2-13-09)
• This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It), (Benedict Carey, Science section, New York Times 5-22-07)
• This is your life. Stop tweeting, texting and multitasking for a minute. Instead, tell your story. (Michael McQueen,
Ode magazine, October 2010.)"As I sat there reading through my dad’s journal, I was captivated by how much I didn’t know about my father and his life. I was struck by the things that were important to him but had gone unspoken, and by how much we had in common....Don’t underestimate the power of your life’s stories. It may be tempting to put off ­sharing or writing them down for another day, but instead make that day today."
• Trapped on the Wrong Side of History (Soundprint radio, Richard Paul, producer, 3-21-11) In 1939, California farm girl Mary Kimoto Tomita traveled to Japan to learn Japanese and connect with the culture of her ancestors--and because of Pearl Harbor was trapped there. Her story -- told through interviews and letters from the time -- is a rare glimpse at a piece of the World War II experience.
• Traversing the Mystery of Memory by Richard A. Friedman (NY Times, 12-30-03). About the accuracy of nostalgia and how the brain records memories. Friedman concludes: "if anything marks us as human, it's more our bent for making sense of things than for discovering the essential truth about them."
• The truth has a price (Lauren B. Davis on memoir's potential for collateral damage, Globe & Mail 9-11-09)

• Ugandan memory books (BBC photo story about how people in an oral-history culture are dealing with parents' early deaths from AIDS)
• Veterans, Alone Together, Share Stories They Can’t Tell You (Lawrence Downes, NY Times Editorial Observer 10-5-08,writing about weekend workshop run by Vets 4 Vets, a Tucson nonprofit that is setting up peer support groups around the country for a new generation of veterans making the transition from "hunter-killer" mode to husband-student mode)
• Veterans History Projecthttp:/​/​www.nytimes.com/​2008/​10/​06/​opinion/​06mon4.html (capturing personal accounts of American war veterans and U.S. citizen civilians involved in war efforts, such as USO workers, flight instructors, medical volunteers)
• Video Biography: The reluctant subject (Jane Lehman-Shafran, Video Biography Central, on why and how to keep after their life story)
• Video Memoir: The Life That Got Away (Jane Lehman-Shafran has made personal and family history documentaries for many clients, and regrets the one she didn't make -- of her Nana. On Wrote by Rote.)
• Vivian Maier, the Chicago nanny and street photographer nobody knew about (fascinating story on Chicago Today). What would you have done with such a discovery? John Maloof started a Vivian Maier blog.
• Videos capture memories to last beyond a lifetime (Peter Schworm, Boston Globe, 8-23-10, with video of dying Auburn mother spending time with her 4- and 6-year-old)

• What I've learned about getting "truthful" interviews (Dan Curtis)
• What is the difference between a memoir (or memoirs) and an autobiography? (Pat McNees, Writers and Editors)
• What's the Point? Bettyan Schmidt (guesting on Women's Memoirs) urges you to include stories with those scrapbook photos, not just headings: Tell stories about the memories those photos represent.
• When I Was Your Age, We Didn't Have Sites for Writing Our Bios by Sarmad Ali (WSJ, 3-31-07, evaluating LifeBio.com and biowriters.Net)
• When Patients Share Their Stories, Health May Improve (Pauline W. Chen, MD, NY Times 2-10-11). See conversation about the article at Healing Through Storytelling Tara Parker-Pope, Well column, NY Times, 2-10-11).
• Why memoir writer Deb Moore enjoys telling stories of others' lives (Terri Finch Hamilton, Grand Rapids Press 12-11-11)
• With personal histories, everyone can star in their memoir (Marsha King, Seattle Times, 9-29-06)
• Why memory lane is such a mortifying stroll (Diane Mapes, msnbc, on how your brain is wired to keep mental souvenirs from times you'd rather forget), and her discussion of Robin Hemley's Do-Over! In which a forty-eight-year-old father of three returns to kindergarten, summer camp, the prom, and other embarrassments
• Who owns the story? (part 1) and Who owns the story? (part 2), by Janet Riehl and Stephanie Farrow, are not about legal ownership but about ethical ownership, asking you questions such as "Is the story true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?" and in particular, "With regard to secrets, are they necessary to your story? Are they yours to tell?" (Guest blogs on Women's Memoirs)
• Why write your memoir? Martha Jewett shares a few answers (4-7-09)

• World War I: Experiences of an English soldier (a blog made from transcripts of Harry Lamin's letters from the first World War, posted exactly 90 years after they were written)
• World War 2: 'We All Had a Piece of Hitler's Desk'. Joy Hunter recalls a remarkable life, working in Churchill's War Rooms and attending the historic Potsdam conference in 1945. (Elizabeth Grice, Telegraph, 9-3-09)
• Write for Your Life (Anna Quindlen, Newsweek, 1-22-07)
• Writers and Editors (rich set of links to resources for writers and editors)
• Writing About Your Religious Upbringing: Jeanne Fobes on Growing Up Catholic (Memoir Mentor, 6-7-11).
• Writing Memoir (online community, AARP,
• Writing Our Lives in Challenging Times (Telling HerStory, StoryCircle Network). Blog with interesting writing prompts, wrapped in essays such as Failures and Other Fiascos (12-19-08) and Glories, Gifts--and Graces
• Writing Your Life Story--Tips and Techniques for Success (Mike Brozda)
• A Year at War (stories of the 30,000 men and women of First Battalion, 87th Infantry, taking part in the Afghanistan surge), excellent New York Times video series.
• You Might Remember This. Painter/​experimental filmmaker Jeff Scher's animated portrait of his son Buster’s life from ages 6 to 10 (Opinionator blog, NY Times 6-18-11, music by Shay Lynch). See also You Won't Remember This (8-23-07, featuring Buster from birth through toddlerhood--music by Sam Bisbee), and You Won't Remember This Either (1-6-09, about younger son Oscar's toddler years). Says Scher: "All three films are about memory, which I like to think of as single grains of sand culled from the steady flow in the hourglass of our life and turned to pearls, to be strung and locked away where they wait, slowly fading. Buster might actually remember some of the moments depicted in this film; some he might remember because of this film. I will remember them all, having now engraved them in memory with crayon, paint and pencil."

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Links to top interview questions and guides
What to ask in a life-story/​oral history interview
You will see wide variation in the kinds of questions asked. For those of us who want a life story to be a narrative, with a narrative arc of its own, and with lots of smaller stories within that framework, open-ended questions may be more helpful than fact-finding questions (which you can fill in with later). Questions for which there is only one answer, especially "yes" or "no," are not going to encourage the person interviewed to open up. What you want is something that will open the floodgates for storytelling, and, when you become more skilled, that can open targeted floodgates, so what you end up with is more coherent from the start. But if what you get is not well-organized, don't worry. It can be organized later. What you want is to get the stories and information flowing in ways that mean something to the storytellers, and that capture their ways of expressing themselves, their voice, their style, their take on the world.
• The Art of the Interview (Marc Pachter's Ted Talk, January 2008)
• Family Health History. You can download two PDF files: (1) "A Guide to Family Health History (which questions to ask, which information to collect, which diseases are hereditary, and so on) and (2) "A Guide to Genetics and Health."
• The 50 Best Life Story Questions (Dan Curtis)
• 50 Questions for Family History Interviews: What to Ask the Relatives by Kimberly Powell, About.com (fact-oriented -- not great for eliciting stories)
• 50 Thanksgiving Story Starters (AARP Bulletin 11-1-11). Questions to ask at the dinner table.
• Great Questions List (StoryCorps)
• Guide for Interviewing Family Members (from Virginia Allee, A Family History Questionnaire)
• Getting to Know You: A How-To Story for Kids on How to Interview Family Members (The Mini-Page, 12-25-10, PDF)
• How to Ask Questions for Family History (Greg Lawrence and Kim Leatherdale, Lifetime Memories and Stories)
• If You Build It, Will They Record Their Stories? Eric Winick's story prompts for incident-based storytelling, as reported by Katharine on the Story Prompts thread of A Storied Career, Kathy Hansen's interesting blog on the intersection and synthesis of various forms of applied storytelling.
• Interviewing advice from oral historian Alessandro Portelli (podcast), part of his story about Hearing Harlan County, offers a glimpse into oral history. See also his outstanding book: The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome.
• Interviewing Family: What Should I Ask? Major Life Events (Susan A. Kitchens, Family Oral History Using Digital Tools)
• Interviewing Relatives (Ancestor Search)
• Interviewing for Research: Guide to One-to-One Interviews by Colin Hyde (East Midlands Oral History Archive, EMOHA)
• Interview Questions for Family Interviews and Interview Techniques to Avoid (Ancestry.com)
• Memory List Question Book (download free 35-page PDF from Soleil Lifestory Network. Denis Ledoux's firm)
• Oral history interview questions and topics (JewishGen)
• Question List, Memory Loss Initiative (StoryCorps)
• Questions for Remembering 9/​11 (StoryCorps September 11th Initiative)
• Questions We Should All Ask Mom (Lisa Belkin, Mother Lode, NY Times Adventures in Parenthood blog)
• Re-membering Pets: Documenting the meaning of people’s relationships with these family members by Barbara Baumgartner, in Explorations: An E-Journal of Narrative Practice (includes a list of questions to ask)
• A Script for Video or Audio Interviews with Family Members (RootsWeb, Ancestry.com)
• Some Possible Questions (Marjorie Hunt, The Smithsonian Folklife and Oral History (PDF, free download, in whole or part)
Interviewing Guide
• Some sure-fire topics for your oral history interview (10 good questions from Delmar Watson)
• 20 Questions to Ask the Important Women in Your Life (Jewish Women's Archive)
• Suggested Questions for Veterans and Questions for Civilians(Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center, U.S. Library of Congress)
• Suggested Questions (Life Story Center, University of Southern Maine). Excellent questions listed by categories: Birth and Family of Origin, Cultural Settings and Traditions, Social Factors, Education, Love and Work, Historical Events and Periods, Retirement, Inner Life and Spiritual Awareness, Major Life Themes, Vision of the Future, Closure.
• What questions should you ask in a video biography interview? (Jane Lehmann-Shafron, Video Biography Central)
• Technical guide to doing telephone interviews (Sam Mallery, B&H)
• Audio Recording and Editing Equipment, Software, and Tutorials
• Guernsey Evacuees Oral History . Gillian Mawson's community group of Guernsey evacuees (ages 72 to 90) in Northern England, sharing stories with each other and the community about evacuating during World War II. Read how they do it -- how she gave them confidence with digital equipment and with talking to the public at events and on radio). Help elders bring history to life!
From the website of Pat McNees

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Practical considerations:
• Can We Tape? A Practical Guide to Taping Phone Calls and In-Person Conversations in the 50 States and D.C. (with a state-by-state guide). (Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Fall 2008)
• The interviewee's right to "edit" a transcript or story (Pat McNees, Writers and Editors 12-12-11)

About reporters' interviews:
• The Art of the Interview, Dale Keiger's presentation at the CASE Editors' Forum (3-30-09)
• Elizabeth Arnold on Interviewing (The Transom Review)
• Mary Pat Flaherty (Wash Post) on interviewing and writing (Patrick Cassidy's Investigative Reporting webpage)
• Secrets to a Successful Interview (Valerie Holladay, ancestry.com, 1-1-05)

Books on interviewing (geared to journalists but possibly helpful for personal history interviewers):
• The Craft of Interviewing by John Joseph Brady
• The Talk Book: The Intimate Science of Communicating in Close Relationships (explains reflective listening and disclosure)
• Creative Interviewing: The Writer's Guide to Gathering Information by Asking Questions by Ken Metzler
• Digital Storytelling Cookbook (order online from Center for Digital Storytelling, CDS). Also available: Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community
• Interviews That Work: A Practical Guide for Journalists by Shirley Biagi
• The Art of the Interview: Lessons from a Master of the Craft by Lawrence Grobel (memoir of a top interviewer who prepares deeply for long interviews; don't expect helpful instruction for quicky interviews)

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ~ Maya Angelou

From the website of Pat McNees

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VIDEO TRIBUTES AND DOCUMENTARIES

These tributes are wonderful gifts and bring life to a gathering, whatever it's for. Whether it's a simple slide show set to music or a well-crafted video or DVD with zooms, pans, titles, captions, and other professional touches, these creations are good for birthdays, bar mitzvahs, graduation parties, engagements, wedding parties, anniversaries, memorial services, funerals, or any social gathering or celebration at which shared memories will be valued.
These are not in alphabetical order but mixed up to provide a variety of viewing experiences, with some of my favorites toward the top.

My Grandma's Tattoo (Miranda Harple and Anne Polsky, AARP Bulletin 11-8-11)

Fracaswell "Cas" Hyman's pilot video. A beautiful explanation of why to capture "now" for later.

Dying San Jose woman leaving a video legacy for her three young children (Linda Goldston, San Jose MercuryNews, 4-4-11).
See samples of LifeChronicles videos here.

Danny & Annie (Vimeo). Danny Perasa and his wife, Annie, went to StoryCorps to recount their twenty-seven-year romance.

The Interview Project (film producer David Lynch's project--a new video interview every few days).

Susan's Garden: A Video Love Letter (on YouTube) and a story about its making: Client makes 'perfect gift' for SCORE advisor (Jan Norman, Orange County Register, 11-21-09)

I Will Survive: Dancing Auschwitz (YouTube), an interesting, controversial video of Jane Korman, her grandfather, Auschwitz survivor Adolek Kohn, and other grandchildren revisiting a site from which he never expected to escape or survive. Here's a BBC interview with Korman and Kohn about reactions to the video.

The Life and Lessons of George M. Leader (video from David Adelman's firm, Reel Tributes). I like their firm promo:Reel Tributes: The Document of a Lifetime (David Adelman)

Samples of video biography and video memoir (Jane Lehmann-Shafron and Peter Shafron, Your Story Here)

The Smooch Project (about the power of reconciliation)

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Digital Storytelling. Using computer technology to tell the stories of your life.
• Center for Digital Storytelling, which publishes a Digital Storytelling Cookbook to get you started (scroll to bottom of page and you can download a 40-page PDF sample from the book). Many excellent resources on this site.
• Digital Storytelling: A Tutorial in 10 Easy Steps (J.D. Lasica, TechSoup, The Technology Place for Nonprofits, 2006)
• The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling
• A Guide to Digital Storytelling (BBC)

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If you are making professional productions for sale and for profit, you may end up paying a lot for music and images. If you are doing a family production to share only with friends and family, you are probably working on a slimmer budget. Luckily a fair number of sources exist for free or lower-cost images and music, of particular use if you are trying to do a Ken-Burns-style combination of voiced narration, music, and images. Do your homework first on rights. Click on Clearing rights and finding rightsholders on the Writers and Editors website.

The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888-1978, by Sarah Greenough, Diane Waggoner, Sarah Kennel, and Matthew S. Witkovsky

Association of Personal Photo Organizers (APPO), as described in Digital Organizers: The Next New Service Industry (The Atlantic, 4-14-11)

Billboard's #1 song on any given date in history, from 19th century on (Josh Hosler's site)

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Clearing rights and finding rightsholders (Copyright and rights page, Writers and Editors website)
• Clearing rights in the visual arts
• Clearing rights for music and sound (through ASCAP,BMI, SASAC, Harry Fox, etc.)
• Clearing rights for books, scripts, screenplays, etc.
• Permissions and releases
• Frequently asked questions about music (Public Domain Information Project, PD Info)

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Critical Past (searchable archive of historical footage: 57,000 videos and 7 million images--searchable for free, with what seem reasonable prices and easy sourcing of footage and photos useful for producing documentaries)

Finding background music for video biographies, podcasts, presentations, etc.
Creating a video biography for your family or a client? You may commission a score or you may want to use "buy-out" music: royalty-free music that you pay for up front, for use in a commercial video production, film score, podcast, and so on. (An example of royalty music: Frank Sinatra singing "My Way.") Here are sites some personal historians in video use (with thanks to members of the Association of Personal Historians for the recommendations):
• Custom Songs by Erik (Erik Balkey, and here's his song Crazy in Love)
• Davenport Music Library (buy a CD containing royalty-free music for audio and video production and to play for telephones on hold)
• DeWolfe Music
• Freeplay Music
• Fresh Music
• Internet Archives Live Music Archives
• Live Music Archive (Internet Archive's archive of live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format--strictly noncommercial, both for access and for further distribution)
• Music Bakery
• Omnimusic
• PBTM Library, instanddownloadmusic.com (royalty-free pro background music)
• PD Info (list of public domain songs, buyout production music, public domain sheet music, from Haven Sound at www.pdinfo.com
• Perfect Choice Music Library (composer Andy Mitran's online music library caters to video producers; you can license his original compositions for a one-time fee)
• Powerful Presentation Music (for training presentations, Bob Pike Group)
• Premium Beat
• Royalty Free Music Library
• Rumblefish Music Licensing Store
• Shockwave-Sound.com (a library of online royalty-free music, stock music, and downloadable sound effects)
• 615 Music
• Sound Snap
• StockMusic.com (royalty-free music, sound effects, and production elements)
• Vimeo Music Store
• Zoom License (music licensing for videography & digital imaging--for montages, professional wedding and event videography, etc.)

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Finding vintage music from a particular year or place
The Web is wonderful for tracking down music from a certain place or period, and often you can listen to the music. Here are some good sites for finding vintage music (play it as background music as you write your memoirs or scan old photos for that photohistory). Remember: Just because it's on the Web doesn't mean it's out of copyright. You must verify that you have the right to reproduce sounds or images you find on the Web.
• Billboard’s #1 Song on Any Given Date in History (Josh Hosler’s site)
• Dismuke's popular songs from the 1920s and 1930s (audio files)
• Fifties Web (material from 1950s and 1960s
• Free Play Music
• Folk Music of England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Canada and Australia
• Great American Songbook (listen online to G.A.S. Station, maintained by the The Society for the Preservation of the Great American Songbook
• Music for funerals, wakes, and memorial services
• National Jukebox (Historical Recordings from the Library of Congress)
• Old Forty-Fives.com ((music and other nostalgic items from the 1950s and 1960s, good for bringing back old memories--but NOT public domain; you must clear rights)
• Perfessor Bill Edwards (Ragtime and other old-time piano music, 1910-1919)
• Popular hymns
• Popular Song Recordings from the Victrola (1913-1919), Besmark
• Popular Songs in American History
• The Year in Music (Wikipedia’s Timeline of Musical Events—Google a year date and “in music”)
• Upchucky Jukebox, popular radio and junkbox songs from 1940s through 1990s
• Take Me Back to the Sixties (Moreoldfortyfives.com, search engine links)
• We Didn't Start the Fire (Ye Li's clever illustration of Billy Joel's song, a fast romp through 50 years of U.S. history)

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Finding photographs and other images:
Remember: Finding a image on the Internet does not mean it's copyright free. The images you find through Yahoo and Google have not been posted there by the copyright owners. Do your homework on copyright, clearing rights, permissions, and fair use.
Meanwhile, here are some good sources of photos:

• Abstract Influence (registration required to enter; community-oriented site with free forums)
• American Heritage Guide to Sight and Sound (Best of the Web links)
• American Memory (Library of Congress)
• Animation and Cartoons
• AP Images(for professional image buyers)
• Artbeats (stock footage)
• Art Archive (www.picture-desk.com) (a fine art and historical picture library with material from over 900 sources worldwide, from 3000 BC to 20th century--and helpful staff who will respond to emails and phone calls)
• Art Resources (fine art images from museums around the world, and if their search engine doesn’t find what you want, talk to their real person)
• CanStockPhot (stock photos)
• CardCow (vintage postcards)
• Cepolina (international site)
• Clipart.com (clip-art, photos, illustrations, fonts, sounds)
• Compfight (a public photo sharing service)
• Corbis (a major photo site, for professional productions)
• Dreamstime (royalty-free images)
• Flickr Commons (help describe Library of Congress photos by adding comments, tags)
• Flickr: The Library of Congress photostream (Flickr makes available 3,000 photos from two of the Library of Congress's most popular collections)
• Fotolia (large supply of stock photos). Fotolia's FAQ may answer some of your questions
• Fotosearch (stock photography and footage, large selection)
• Free and commercial stock photography sites (Jourdan Wilkerson very helpfully describes and compares many sites, indicating price range or if free)
• Free clip art for your blog (Wordplay!)
• FreeFoto.com (free, but you must include an attribution and loink back to FreeFoto.com)
• FreeDigitalPhotos (easy search, well-organized)
• Free Historical Stock Photos
• Free Range
• FreeStockPhotos.com (check out excellent links to free photo sites along right side)
• Gallery of Graphic Design (check out the categories!)
• Getty Images (premium stock footage from archival film to contemporary HD video, including daily entertainment video; royalty-free stock footage as well as better selections, by subscription)
• Image After (images and textures)
• Image Base (images free, under Creative Commons License)
• iStockphoto (royalty-free stock photos, relatively inexpensive)
• Kave Wall (professional-quality closeups and macro-photography --images in categories such as fire, food, holiday, money (household), toys, tattoos)
• Kobal Collection (www.picture-desk.com) (leading film photo archive with over a million images, from earliest days of the cinema to latest releases)
• Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (huge, wonderful collection of historical prints and photographs; some images downloadable immediately, others for a small fee)
• Library of Congress webcasts
• Photos of the Great Depression and New Deal (FDR Library)
• Life Magazine Photo Archive (hosted by Google)
• Maps.com (royalty-free maps)
• Map Resources (royalty-free vector maps)
• Molly Maps (custom hand-drawn maps and views)
• MorgueFile (public image archives for creatives by creatives)
• Moving Pictures Archives (and while you're there, check out other Internet Archives)
• National Archives (including wonderful wartime photos)
• New York Public Library Digital Gallery (over 275,000 images digitized from the library collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, etc.--yours for a small fee)
• Old Magazine Articles
• Open Video Project (shared digital video collection)
• PhotoRogue (request a photo of anything you want and volunteers may go out and take photo for you, for free -- no guarantees!)
• Picture-Desk.com (Kobal Collection, for movies, TV, entertainment, and The Art Archive, good fine art site, with helpful people)
• Open Photo (images grouped by category)
• Pixelgalerie
• Pixel Perfect Digital
• Prelinger Archives (over 2,000 films)
• Prints and Photographs Reading Room (Library of Congress)
• Public domain images
• Rattlesnake Jack's Old West Clip Art Parlor; here's the table of contents
• Shorpy (great historical images)
• Shutterstock (royalty-free stock photos, subscription model)
• Stock.XCHNG (free stock photos, now owned by Getty Images)
• Stockvault
• TinEye (reverse image search engine)
• 25 Places to Find Awesome Stock Photos -- Free and Cheap! (TutorialBlog)
• Universal newsreels (from before television)
• Unprofound (images grouped by color)
• U.S. Government Photos and Images (mostly public domain, but as always, read the fine print)
• Veer.com (stock art and interesting fonts, reasonable prices)
• Vintage Music Album Covers
• Visual Connections (formerly Picturehouse; directory of suppliers of stock photography, illustrations and footage, photographers, and font foundries
• Visual resources online (American Library Association, links to great sites, historical societies, etc.)
• Woofie (map-based display of travel photos around the world)
• WorldofMaps.net
• Yale Digital Commons, explained in this press release: Digital Images of Yale’s Vast Cultural Collections Now Available for Free (with slideshow). Yale has adopted an open access policy--which means you are free to view the images but you need permission to reproduce them.
• Zen Textures (stock textures)

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From Digital Audio Recording to Audio CD: Part 1 - Audio into Audacity (Susan Kitchens, Family Oral History Using Digital Tools)
From Digital Audio Recording to Audio CD: Part 2 - Basic Audio Edits (also Susan Kitchens)

PhotoBook Press (for heirloom-quality photobooks, made with archival paper and Smyth-sewn-signature bindings, which, unlike glued bindings from most POD presses, won't fall apart)

The Photo Detective, blog of Maureen Taylor, who solves photo mysteries based on visual clues.

Photos from the Great Depression (roughly 1600 color photos taken during 1939-1944 in U.S., P.R., and Virgin Islands, focusing mostly on rural areas, farm labor, and aspects of World War II mobilization, including factories, railroads, aviation training, and women working)

Postcards, online archives:
• Curt Teich Postcard Archives)
• Postcard and Greeting Card Museum (Emotions Greeting Cards)

Scanning Basics 101. Wayne Fulton's useful site)includes useful pages such as Scanning and Printing Resolution Calculator.

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Preserving Your Family Treasures: Archiving, Conservation, and Preservation

• American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, which has an old blog and a new blog, among other things
• The Archival Advisor (guide for photo collectors, genealogists, scrapbookers, from RIT's Image Permanence Institute) and Archival Advisor newsletter archives (Image Permanence Institute)
• Archival Internet Resources (Ready, 'Net, Go! an archival "meta index," or index of archival indexes)
• Articles about image archiving (Wilhelm Imaging Research)
• Association of Personal Photo Organizers (APPO), as described in Digital Organizers: The Next New Service Industry (The Atlantic, 4-14-11)
• Bit by Electronic Bit, a Cantor’s Voice Is Restored. Joseph Berger (NYTimes 7-20-10) on how a 52-year-old non-techie Hasidic Jew who runs a record shop in Brooklyn, with advice from some experts, used advanced audio restoration programs on a regular computer to get rid of the crackles and hisses in old recordings of a "Jewish Caruso," a "Cantor for the Ages."
• Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists by Fred R. Byers (PDF, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Council on Library and Information Resources, 2003)
• Caring for Your Family Archives with answers to common questions from preservation and archives professionals -- on such topics as preserving family papers, mounting things safely in albums, attaching photos to album pages, removing photos from old albums, captioning photos, framing and displaying photos, converting home movies to video tape (good for viewing but not for preservation), getting documents repaired, digitizing photo collections.
• Caring for Your Treasures (tips from the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (by category, such as photos, home videotape, documents and works of art on paper, metal objects)
• Conservation services, and how to select a conservator (American Institute for Conservation of Historic & Artistic Works, or AIC)
• Conservation OnLine Resources for Conservation Professionals (COoL) "a full text library of conservation information . . . [concerning] library, archives and museum materials."
• A Consumer Guide to Materials for Preservation Framing and the Display of Photographic Images (Image Permanence Institute)
• Digital Preservation (Library of Congress)
• Family Archives (tips for preserving family treasures--click through to more specific topics)
• Family Treasures and Resources (Library of Congress Preservation Directorate)
• Graphics Atlas Tutorials (Image Permanence Institute tutorials on process groups, imaging techniques, identification)
• A Guide to Donating Your Personal or Family Papers to a Repository (Society of American Archivists, part of its free online services.
• Home Film Preservation Guide (Film Forever, Association of Moving Image Archivists, AMIA)
• How to care for your heirlooms(Canadian Conservation Institute)
• Image Permanence Institute papers, articles, reports plus special pages such as the Dew Point Calculator (and risk of mold)
• Journal of the American Institute for Conservation (JAIC) online (Volume 16, 1977 - Volume 44, 2005), hosted by COOL
• NARA Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Archival Materials for Electronic Access: Creation of Production Master Files - Raster Images (National Archives and Records Administration)
• Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC, excellent and extensive links to online leaflets on conservation and preservation)
• Notes on Photographs (George Eastman House)
• Practical Archivist, Sally Jacobs on preserving family heirlooms. Sign up for her newsletter and get her free booklet 8 Blunders People Make When They Scan Photos and How To Avoid Them All.
• Preservation Calculator for Photo Storage (Archival Advisor, Image Permanence Institute)
• Preservation, information about (Library of Congress)
• Preservation and conservation, information about (U.S. National Archives)
• Preserving Your Family Photographs: How to Organize, Present, and Restore Your Precious Family Images by Maureen A. Taylor, author of Uncovering Your Ancestry Through Family Photograph. Watch Maureen solve cases on Photo Detective. Sign up for her free e-mail newsletter, The Photo Detective with tips and articles.
• Preserving Memories: Caring for Your Heritage (Clarke Historical Library in Michigan on how to care for, copy, and store letters, diaries, books, and other paper items; photographs; VCR tape, etc.)
• Preserving Photographs & Documents (FamilySearch wiki)
• Recommended Reading (Archival Advisor)
• Society of American Archivists (SAA) provides a directory, National Archival Organizations in the United States, with links to societies of medical archivists, religious archivists, regional history archivists, business archivists, and state organizations of archivists. See also Associated Professional Organizations and So You Want to Be an Archivists: An Overview of the Archives Profession.
• Tools for Archivists (Special Collections Division, Tulane University)

Preservation, books on
• Caring for Your Family Treasures: Heritage Preservation by Jane Long and Richard Long (the care and handling of precious family heirlooms such as old silver, wedding gowns, scrapbooks, photos, books, and dolls)
• Saving Stuff: How to Care for and Preserve Your Collectibles, Heirlooms, and Other Prized Possessions by Don Williams and Louisa Jaggar (senior conservators of the Smithsonian Institution)
• Keeping Your Past: A Basic Guide to Preserving Your Family Papers and Photographs ($8 for 22-page guide, from Kansas City Area Archivists)
http:/​/​www.umkc.edu/​kcaa/​Publications/​KYP.htm

Adding metadata to photos:
Please tell me about other helpful online resources:
• How to Add Copyright Management Information to Your Photos (Carolyn E. Wright, Photo Attorney, 6-22-11)
• Why You Should Add Metadata To Your Photos (Carolyn E. Wright, Photo Attorney, 10-7-08)
• Watermarking Slideshow PDF Files (Sean McCormack, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 8-2-07)
• Why metalog (Controlled Vocabulary)
• Mind Your Phraseology (Christina Wodtke explains "controlled vocabulary," Digital Web Magazine 8-13-02)
• Examples of photo indexing for an electronic archive (Visual Edge '98)

Suppliers of Archival Materials
We do not endorse or recommend any of the following vendors of archival supplies and equipment.
• Archival Methods (Henrietta, NY 14467; 1-866-877-7050)
• Conservation Resources (Springfield, VA 22151: 1-800-634-6932
• Gaylord Brothers (1.800.962.9580)
• Hollinger Metal Edge (Commerce, CA 90040; 1-800-862-2228 and Fredericksburg, VA 22408; 1-800-634-0491)
• Talas (Brooklyn, NY 11211; 1-212-219-0770
• University Products Holyoke, MA 01041-0101: 1-800-628-1912)
See the New York State Archives for a fuller list (with addresses) of these and other vendors of archival supplies.
Light Impressions, several colleagues tell me, is no longer reliable at filling orders.
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TIMELINES, ARCHIVES, FAMILY HISTORY,
GENEALOGICAL AND OTHER HISTORICAL RESOURCES
See links about archiving and preservation in section just above this one.

THIS SECTION IS DEFINITELY UNDER RECONSTRUCTION! TRYING TO ORGANIZE IT IN THE MOST USEFUL WAY, but short on time.

• National Genealogical Society American Genealogy Home-Study Course (for learning how to research in a wide variety of original records and repositories)
• The ProGen Study Group. Each month group members study one or two chapters of Professional Genealogy: A Manual for Researchers, Writers, Editors, Lecturers, and Librarians by Elizabeth Shown Mills and complete a practical assignment relating to the material. Fee of $95 to offset costs of website and Basecamp project management website. See also FAQ and lesson samples.

Genealogy gateway sites -- leading you where you need to go
• Cyndi's List (superb, encyclopedic portal to links to genealogy-related websites, categorized and cross-reference in 180 categories)
• Academic Genealogy (a wiki: Family Genealogy and History Internet Education Directory). Megadirectory to genealogy and family history records, well worth exploring.
• One-Stop Webpages of Stephen P. Morse (excellent portal site, explained here, especially good for New York City area)
• Not Your Grandmother's Genealogy Hobby (Alina Dizik, WSJ 12-1-11). Wikis, social-networking sites, search engines and online courses are changing genealogy from a loner's hobby to a social butterfly's field day. New tools and expansive digital archives, including many with images of original documents, are helping genealogy newbies do research. Some are behind paywalls

Searchable genealogy and family history databases, sites
Some databases are free, some behind paywalls (marked $, often with a free trial). Some are licensed only to institutions, but may be accessible through a public or university library or a Family History Center.)

• Ancestry.com ($), a subscription site that links to many U.S. public records, including census and military records, and in 186 categories, including countries (and localities), record types, repositories, research techniques, clothing styles, histories of buildings, early medical technologies, occupations -- and much more. Top ranking family history site in this review of top-ranking genealogy search sites.
• Heritage Quest Online, available free through subscribing libraries, Heritage Quest Online has an intuitive interface, clear census images from 1790 to 1930, information about people and places in the PERiodic Source (PERSI) of the Fort Wayne Public Library, a digital version of the microfilm collections of University Microfilm, Lexis-Nexis U.S. Serials, some records from Revolutionary War pension and bounty-land warrant application files; individuals in Freedman's Bank (1986-1874), founded to serve African Americans; memorials, petitions, and relief actions of the U.S. Congress. No individual subscriptions, but you may be able to use in a library.
• U.S. GenWeb (free, volunteer-run, with rich information for some counties)
• Family Search (free). Family tree and genealogy records, including the International Genealogical Index, which contains records from early 1500s to early 1900s, collected by the Mormon Church, noted for its emphasis on genealogy -- with 4,500 Family History Centers worldwide (click here to find one near you ), branch facilities of the Mormons' well-known Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah
• Archives.com ($), a fairly new subscription site, reviewed here (see comments)
• World Vital Records ($, U.S. or World) Marriage, birth, death, court, and military records, plus passenger lists, yearbooks, manuscripts, parish and land records and more.
• Fold3, formerly Footnote: large military history database. (See Military Records, History, and Archives below.)
• RootsWeb (oldest, largest free genealogy site, an Ancestry.com community -- many helpful links). Check out indexes to RootsWeb contents: by subject and by issue number.
• Ancestor Search (free--includes Questions for family interviews.
• Social Security Death Index (SSDI --U.S.) Find birth and death dates in this database of info on U.S. citizens who have died since 1962. SSDI, explains Linda Coffin, of History Crafters, is an index to only one kind of record, in one kind of repository. It's not a primary source the way a death certificate or a death record would be, so you might get discrepancies between it and official documents or other databases. Another place to search: the Social Security Death Master File, but the Social Security Administration does not have death records for everyone and doesn't guarantee the veracity of these records. (Which, as Linda observes, is what makes genealogy research so interesting.)
• GenUKI, portal to genealogical information for UK and Ireland (England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Isle of Man, Channel Islands). See "Irish and UK Genealogy" below for more links.
Local U.S. resources
• 101 most state-of-the-art state state archives (David A. Fryxell, Family Tree Magazine 6-14-11). Best state archives and historical societies in the United States, including Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin
• Godfrey Memorial Library Online (A Library of Genealogy, History and Biography--covers world, but strong on New England)

Census Records, U.S., National Archives, where you can go to find a huge amount of information (but if you need to do it online, go to ancestry.com or HeritageQuestOnline).
• Online census data (U.S., on Ancestry.com)
• Online census data (U.S. on HeritageQuest) (find ancestors in complete set of U.S. census images, 1790-1930)
1940 U.S. census records, to be released April 2, 2012
• How can I search the Census Records? (National Archives how-to page)
• Frequently asked questions (National Archives)
• How to Access the 1940 Census (Steven Morse)

Immigration, Ports of Entry
• Ellis Island Records. The Ellis Island Foundation has passenger records for 22 million passengers and ship crews, 1892-1924, with name, date of arrival, age on arrival, ship manifests and other information). See the Castle Garden site for information about earlier immigrants.
• American Family Immigration History Center, Ellis Island (search free to find your immigrant ancestors entering American through New York)
Australian National Immigration Collection (1788-1923) now online. News release about Ancestry.com's searchable database of over 14 million historical immigration records
• Castle Garden (database of info on 10 million U.S. immigrants from 1830 through 1892, the year Ellis Island opened)
• Steven Morse's one-stop webpage (with links to search forms for passenger lists, ship lists, manifests for Ellis Island, Castle Garden, and other ports (including Baltimore, Boston, Galveston, New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Canada -- plus Germans, Italians, and Russians to America.

Land and residential data
• Bureau of Land Management records (U.S. Dept of Interior) U.S. land records from 1810 to 1960 -- learn where your family had land; get certified copies of land patents.
• Urban Genealogy (uncover the history of any New York City building)
• Historic Map Works ($, residential genealogy). See also Google Earth, for how things look now.
• City-Data.com (rankings in hundreds of categories, such as income, crime, most gay couples, most cars, shortest commute, biggest houses, best educated residents, and many more)
• Atlas of Historical County Boundaries (interactive maps and chronologies of county history, helpful for tracking changes in county names and boundaries)
Adoption issues and resources:
• Adoption (Cyndi's List directory of information resources)
• Adoption and Orphans Research, RootsWeb's Guide to Tracing Family Trees. For adoptees searching for their birth families.
• Adoptees Genealogy Research (Quick links)
• Bastard Nation (Adoptee Rights Organization)
• Who's on the Family Tree? Now It's Complicated (Laura M. Holson, NY Times, 7-4-11). Check out "Readers share their thoughts"
• AMA's adult family (health) history forms, genetic and otherwise (American Medical Association)

African American genealogy and history
• African American history records (Ancestry.com). Slave narratives, troop records for U.S. colored troops in the Civil War, Freedman's Bank and Bureau records, World War I draft cards, etc.
• African Ancestry (a DC-based genetic genealogy company that helps people of African descent "trace their ancestry back to their present-day African country of origin by analyzing their DNA")
• Digital Library on American Slavery
• National Visionary Leadership Project (interviews with African American elders)
• AfriQuest (user-submitted records)

Irish and UK genealogy
• BBC's excellent Family History resources, including timelines of British history, ancient history, Irish history (e.g., "The Troubles, 1963-85")
• The National Archives, UK (official govt archives, from Domesday Book to various websites. Here's Getting Started overview
• Find My Past ($, UK genealogy site with huge records collection; project with British Library to digitize archives of India Office; Find My Past, the TV show
• GenUKI (UK & Ireland genealogy)
• Irish Genealogy (scroll down for links to online resources)
• Origins.net ($, subscribe to British Origins, Irish Origins, or both)
• Ancestry.com's new Irish historical records
• Irish Genealogical Society International (Irish genealogical researchers looking for Irish and Scots-Irish ancestors in Ireland and around the world--based in Minneapolis)
• Irish Genealogy (based in Ireland)
• Scotlands People ($, the official Scottish genealogy resource). Scottish census and parish records, statutory registers, coats of arms, wills and testaments

Jewish genealogy
• Jewish Gen (affiliated with the Museum of Jewish Heritage; among other resources, the Yizkor Book Master Name Index
• Frequently asked questions (JewishGen)
• Avotaynu (publisher of products of interest to those researching Jewish genealogy, Jewish family trees, or Jewish roots)
• Jewish Genealogy, Surnames, and Family History (excellent links)
• SephardicGen.com (Jeffrey Malka's Sephardic links)
• Sephardic Forum
• Jewish Web Index
• Southern Africa Jewish Genealogy Special Interest Group (SA-SIG)
• Jewish genealogy sites (Hareshima.com)
• JewishGen KehilaLinks (formerly "ShtetLinks"), commemorating the places Jews have lived

• Cyndi's list links to ethnic associations

European genealogy
• Portals to the World (links to electronic resources from around the world)
• Regional Genealogy and Local History Research (Academic-Genealogy.com, portal to links worldwide)
• The Federation of East European Family History Societies (FEEFHS)
• Map-based links to European data
• Danish Demographic Database (Danish census and emigration records)
• National Archives of Norway (now in English)
• Genlias (Find your Dutch ancestors fast)
• Polish Roots (Polish genealogy source)

More Family History Resources
• Cousins Chart (Los Quatro Ojos)
• Family Group Record sheet (PDF, Ancestry.com)
• Find a grave
• GenForum (find the forum for one of your family surnames, find people doing research on same lines, and ask questions, which you may find distant relatives answering)
• GenealogyWise (genealogy social network)
• Geneabloggers (blogs in genealogy community)
* The Genographic Project (National Geographic -- with a single cheek swab, learn about your deep ancestry)
• The Gene Pool (resources helpful for family histories)
• The ProGen Study Group. Each month group members study one or two chapters of Professional Genealogy: A Manual for Researchers, Writers, Editors, Lecturers, and Librarians by Elizabeth Shown Mills and complete a practical assignment relating to the material.
• NGS American Genealogy Home-Study Course (for learning how to research in a wide variety of original records and repositories)
• Relatively Curious about Genealogy blog
• Rootsweb Guide to Tracing Family Trees
• How to Get Started Building Your Family Tree (Ancestor Search, Ancestry.com)


THIS SECTION UNDER RECONSTRUCTION!!!

• 12 top-rated family tree makers (software rated by personal historian Dan Curtis)
• Geni.com(create your own family tree)
• Genealogy Gems News (Lisa Louise Cook, host of Genealogy Gems Podcast
• The Genealogy Guys Podcast
• 15 Great Websites for Genealogy Research (Judi Hasson, AARP, 5-16-11)
• Genealogy CDs
• Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness (Facebook page explaining the temporary suspension of this site, which connects visitors with volunteers around the world who search for local historical records, church documents, headstones)

Books About Genealogy If you purchase anything after linking to Amazon through one of these links, we get a small commission, which helps support the cost of maintaining this site. • Genealogy 101: How to Trace Your Family's History and Heritage by Barbara Renick (National Genealogical Society) • How to Do Everything: Genealogy by George M. Morgan • The Family Tree Problem Solver: Tried-and-True Tactics for Tracing Elusive Ancestors by Marsha Hoffman Rising • The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy, ed. by Loretto Dennis Szucs and Sandra Hargreaves Luebking • Bringing Your Family History to Life Through Social History by Katherine Scott Sturdevant (out of print, but many used copies are available) • Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian (Elizabeth Shown Mills) • Evidence Explained:Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace • Quicksheet Citing Ancestry.com Databases & Images (Elizabeth Shown Mills) • Quicksheet: Genealogical Problem Analysis: A Strategic Plan (Evidence, Style) (Elizabeth Shown Mills, templates and examples for writing source list Entries, reference notes, etc.) Consider these if you want to do genealogy professionally: • Becoming an Accredited Genealogist: Plus 100 Tips to Ensure Your Success by Karen Clifford (to prepare you for taking the accreditation examination offered by the Family History Library in Salt Lake City) • Professional Genealogy: A Manual for Researchers, Writers, Editors, Lecturers, and Librarians by Elizabeth Shown Mills • The BCG Genealogical Standards Manual (Board for Certification Of Genealogists, published by Ancestry.com)

Ancestors (companion site to the PBS family history and genealogy television series)

**Ancestry.com (links to many U.S. public records, including census and military records)

BackUpMyTree, a free online backup service for your genealogy files, described by Diane Haddad, Genealogy Insider 9-13-10

Family Health History Resources (the Genetics Alliance's excellent list of resources, including the Mayo Clinic's guide to compiling your family medical tree and CDC's podcast on how collecting family history information could save your child's life.

GenealogyCDs (regional and by family)

Genealogy Gems News (on PBS's Faces of America series)

The Genealogy Guys Podcast


Genealogy 101: How to Trace Your Family's History and Heritage by Barbara Renick, of the National Genealogical Society

GenealogyWise (genealogy social network)

GenForum (find the forum for one of your family surnames, find people doing research on same lines, and ask questions, which you may find distant relatives answering)

Geni.com(create your own family tree)

* The Genographic Project (National Geographic -- with a single cheek swab, learn about your deep ancestry)

The Gene Pool (resources helpful for family histories)

Historic newspapers
• Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (Library of Congress & National Endowment for the Humanities). Search America's historic newspapers' pages (1836-1922) or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.
• SmallTownPapers (over 250 small-town newspapers you can read free every week; browse and search scanned newspaper archive from 1865 on).
• NewsBank (searchable at libraries--see if you can have remote access through your local or university library)
• Newspaper Archive (access used to be through a library; browse by location, date, title, surname; subscriptions for individuals now available but a fellow biographer who asked to stop subscription is having trouble getting them to stop collecting the monthly $$).
• ObitsArchive (large searchable database of obituaries)
• GenealogyBank's Historical Newspaper Archives (over 320 years of obituaries, birth, marriages and newspaper articles about other key life events)
• America's Historical Newspapers (Readex's online database, from 1690 to recent past)
• One Hundred Years Ago in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania


History Sites (popular history)
(See Timelines in entry below this one)
• African American history records (Ancestry.com). Slave narratives, troop records for U.S. colored troops in the Civil War, Freedman's Bank and Bureau records, World War I draft cards, etc.
• American Folklife Center Online Archive of Symposia and Related Events
• America in the 1930s (timeline, images, radio broadcasts, etc., from University of Virginia American Studies)
• American cultural history in the 20th century, decade by decade (Lone Star College, Kingwood Library, good for background)
• American Heritage History Sites
• American Life Histories (manuscripts from the Folklore Project, WPA Federal Writer's Project, 1936-1940)
• America Writes Home (Letters from before 1920, National Old Time Letters Project)
• Archive Grid. This fee-based service for locating archival materials, based on nearly one million collection descriptions from thousands of libraries and archives, will soon be freely available via an experimental interface developed by OCLC.
• BBC's excellent Family History resources, including timelines of British history, ancient history, Irish history (e.g., "The Troubles, 1963-85")
• British History Online (printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isle)
• Canadian Archives (in English or French)
• *Current value of old money (info from scholars around the world -- scroll down for comparisons of the purchasing power of money in the United States, or the colonies in North America, from 1665 to any other year up to the present)
• Diaries In The Key Of Steinway: A Piano Builder's View Of 19th-Century New York, Thomas Huizenga's story, NPR Music, 12-17-10, about an online exhibit of William Steinway's diary, 1961-1896, courtesy of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
• The Dirty Thirties (McCord Museum exhibit: Images of the Great Depression in Canada include breadlines, relief camps, protest marches and dust storms sweeping over the western plains)
• Historical Atlas of the 20th Century
• Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace by Elizabeth Shown Mills (884 pages). Apparently an important guide to evaluating and citing sources in family (genealogical) research--including electronic resources. Described in one review as a "monumental improvement over earlier works," important for family researchers.
• Experiencing War, Stories from the Veterans History Project (by theme: Forever a Soldier, companion to the PBS series, The War; Voices of War, the first VHP collection; and other themes: courage, buddies, patriotism, sweethearts, family ties, on a mission, life-altering moments, hurry up and wait, military intel, woman at war, the art of war, Hispanic Americans, Asian-Pacific Americans, Disabled Veterans, Buffalo Soldiers, American Indians, military medicine, D-Day, POWs, VJ-Day, VE-Day, China-Burma-India, Helicopters: the multimission aircraft, submarines, Coast Guard and Merchant Marine. A Library of Congress project.
• EyeWitness to History (History through the eyes of those who lived it)
• Fads over the decades (from Mahjongg to earth shoes to body piercing), from CrazyFads.com
• Fifties Web (site devoted to popular history of 1950s and 1960s, including such items as Burma-Shave Slogans of the '50s
• Free Speech Movement (Barbara Stack's bibliography and archives, 1965 on). See also HUAC Black Friday Riot
• Gallery of Graphic Design (ads from popular magazines from '30s through '60s)
• Global Gateway: World Culture & Resources (U.S. Library of Congress)
• Historical Voices (spoken-word archives)
• History Matters (U.S. History Course on the Web, American Social History Project)
• Inflation Calculator (CPI) and West Egg's Inflation Calculator (how much was X worth in 19yy, in today's dollars? with links to other inflation-related sites)
• Interactive Census Project (Fold3)
• Internet Archive (Wayback Machine). Excellent site: spend time exploring its resources!
• In the First Person (an index to letters, diaries, oral histories and personal narratives -- to more than 4,000 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world)
• Land records (U.S. Bureau of Land Management database records, 1810-1960)
• Memory Archive (a wiki-encyclopedia of memories)
• Library of Congress Local History and Genealogy Reading Room. Check out the entire menu of invaluable Library of Congress Digital Collections (American history and culture, historic newspapers, international collections, legislative information, performing arts, prints & photographs, Veterans History, and website archives). Collection highlights and 25 most frequently asked questions by visitors.
• Mr. Pop Culture (week by week, 1950s through 2000s)
• National Archives (superb resources for genealogists, family historians, nonfiction research)
• National Archives, UK (official government archives, from Domesday Book to websites). Here's a Getting Started overview.
• New Jersey State Archives (NJDARM, good historical records)
• OCLC Global Gateway. The world's libraries. Connected.
• Quakes' many stories to go on the record (Philip Matthews, The Press, New Zealand 6-8-11) and an earlier story about the 2011 Christchurch earthquake: How to remember our dark days (Christopher Moore 6-8-11).
• September 11 Digital Archive (saving the histories of Sept. 11, 2001)
• Take Me Back to the Sixties (great music-and-images stroll down Memory Lane, but don't use this music in your projects without clearing permissions)
• The Tenement Museum (NYC)
• The Wayback Machine/​Internet Archive (digital archive of old Internet sites, including earlier versions of current sites)
• Weather Warehouse, learn what the weather was like on a certain date at a certain location (for fee)
• Weather History (Weather Underground, what the weather was like on a certain date and place) (free)
• We Didn't Start the Fire (Ye Li's clever illustration of Billy Joel's song, a fast romp through 50 years of U.S. history)
• Worldhistory.com(interactive maps, timelines, artifacts, etc., and check out miscellany posted on their Twitter account)

History Timelines
• AlternaTime (links to many excellent history timelines, worldwide)
• America's Best History (U.S. history timeline)
• America in the 1930s
• American Cultural History: The Twentieth Century (decade by decade) (Lone Star College). See similar timeline for the 19th Century
• Best of History Sites (portal to annotated links to over 1200 history web sites and educational resources)
• What happened in a particular month and year, in history (Scope Systems historic events and birth dates that occurred on a SELECTED month and year)
• WorldHistory.com (interactive maps, timelines, artifacts, etc., and check out miscellany posted on their Twitter account)
• On This Day: Today's Highlights in History (New York Times)
• "This day in history" (dMarie time capsule--enter a date MM/​DD/​YYYY)
• "This day in history" (Scopes--historic events for a particular month and day)
• The Timetables of American History by Laurence Urdang (reference book, foreword by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.).
• The Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events by Bernard Grun (reference book)
• TimeandDate.com (perpetual and make-your-own calendars -- various calendars, holiday and date calculators)

• Our Timelines (helps you create family timelines in historical context)
[to be continued when I find time!]

Holocaust Resources
• Holocaust Resources (Web links to valuable resources, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
• Holocaust Historical Data Goes Digital (AP story: "Israel's Yad Vashem memorial, the world's largest collection of Holocaust documents, is teaming up with Google to make its photographs and documents interactive and searchable on the Internet."
• Yad Vashem Photo Archive
• Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names
• Holocaust Oral History Projects
• Electronic Resources About Holocaust

Organizations for people interested in genealogy and family histories
• National Genealogical Society.. Among other things, an excellent selection of materials including videos like this video of Janet Alpert on Getting Started--on how we first start doing genealogical because we're curious about our identity a generation or so back, then we discover how much information is available, get curious, then get hooked, and the research deepens. Check out their super collection of videos, of interest to anyone tracking down family history or curious about genealogy (as hobby or career).
• Society of American Archivists (SAA) provides a directory, National Archival Organizations in the United States, with links to societies of medical archivists, religious archivists, regional history archivists, business archivists, and state organizations of archivists. See also So You Want to Be an Archivists: An Overview of the Archives Profession.
• The Federation of East European Family History Societies
• Cyndi's list of ethnic organizations
More to come.

Military Records, History, and Archives
• Fold3 (for the third fold of the flag) and the Fold3 blog. Original historical and military records from the National Archives, “most never before available on the Internet," from the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWI, and WWII. Formerly Footnote).
• Military Indexes and Records, Online (rosters, databases of soldiers, and listings of military and war casualties, for Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Mexican War, U.S. Civil War, Spanish American War, World Wars I and II, Korean War, Vietnam War)
• U.S. military service records, how to get copies (U.S. National Archives)
• Veterans’ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
• Pritzker Military Library (research library focused on the citizen soldier)
• African American history records (Ancestry.com). Slave narratives, troop records for U.S. colored troops in the Civil War, Freedman's Bank and Bureau records, World War I draft cards, etc.
• Researching Your Civil War Ancestry Online (Kathleen Brandt, AARP 4-11-11)
• Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System (CWSS)
• Iraq Veterans Memorial
• U.S. Army Heritage Collections Online
• U.S. Army Military Institute, a branch of the Army Heritage and Education Center (located in Ridgway Hall near the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania)
• Experiencing War, Stories from the Veterans History Project (by theme: Forever a Soldier, companion to the PBS series, The War; Voices of War, the first VHP collection; and other themes: courage, buddies, patriotism, sweethearts, family ties, on a mission, life-altering moments, hurry up and wait, military intel, woman at war, the art of war, Hispanic Americans, Asian-Pacific Americans, Disabled Veterans, Buffalo Soldiers, American Indians, military medicine, D-Day, POWs, VJ-Day, VE-Day, China-Burma-India, Helicopters: the multimission aircraft, submarines, Coast Guard and Merchant Marine. A Library of Congress project.

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Mr. Pop Culture (week by week, 1950s through 2000s)

My Life in Genealogy
by David Rencher, chief genealogical officer for FamilySearch, telling the story of how he got his start in genealogy, his personal research, and the legacy he hopes to leave his children. Interview filmed by Kate Geis and Allen Moore for National Genealogical Society.

National Archives (U.S.) (superb resources for genealogists, family historians, nonfiction research)

National Archives, UK (official government archives, from Domesday Book to websites). Here's a Getting Started overview.

What's New in Genealogy & Family History Resources? (Academic-Genealogy.com)

WorldGenWeb Project, The. (worldwide network of volunteer genealogists, some of whom may have digitized maps, birth records, cemetery records, etc., from the location you're searching)

World Vital Records (large database, including birth, death, military, census, and parish records, newspapers, and family histories)

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[Go Top]
"Most men would rather have you hear their story than grant their wish." ~Old saying

DOING ORAL HISTORIES

An oral history is more specific than a video interview (for one thing, an oral history is typically archived for access by historians -- its aim is to capture history in the words of history's participants), but some of the same practical information may be helpful for video histories.

Online guides to doing oral history:
Scroll down for a list of books on the subject.
• Principles and Best Practices for Oral History (Oral History Association, adopted October 2009).
• Baylor Institute for Oral History offers, among other things, a Digital Oral History Workshop (do download the PDF of chapter 3 from Oral History for Texans (about interviewing).
• Interviewing for Research. An excellent online guide to conducting one-to-one semi-structured or unstructured interviews, prepared by Colin Hyde of the East Midlands Oral History Archive (Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester, UK).
• Making Sense of Oral History (Linda Shopes, History Matters)
• Step-by-Step Guide to Oral History (Judith Moyer)
• A Quick Guide to Conducting an Oral History (Carol Hicke, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, formerly A One-Minute Guide...)
• Oral History Association Wiki (to find and share information resources about oral history)
• Tips for Interviewers (UC Berkeley Library), from Willa K. Baum's Oral History for the Local Historical Society
• Veterans History Project (guide to participation)
• Art of the Oral Historian (UC, Santa Barbara)
• Fundamentals of Oral History: Texas Preservation Guidelines (Texas Historical Commission)
• National Park Service Guide to Doing Oral History
• Folklife and Fieldwork: An Introduction to Field Techniques (the American Folklife Center's online guide to documenting our diverse folk cultural heritage, Library of Congress). See, for example, model forms: fieldwork data sheet, audio and video recording log, still photography log, and release form. (Also available as a 46-page PDF file in English or in Spanish (La Tradición Popular y la Investicación de Campo).)
• Smithsonian Folk Life and Oral History Guide by Marjorie Hunt (PDF file)
• U.S. Army Guide to Oral History (Stephen J. Lofgren, U.S. Army Center of Military History)
• Informed Consent form and Deed of Gift form, part of onlineOral History Techniques, Center for the Study of History and Memory (Indiana University, Bloomington)
• Can We Tape? A Practical Guide to Taping Phone Calls and In-Person Conversations in the 50 States and D.C. (with a state-by-state guide). (Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Fall 2008)
• In Our Own Voices: a guide to conducting life history interviews with American Jewish women by Jayne K. Guberman, Jewish Women's Archive. Click here to read the book free at Google Books.
• How to do an oral history (Kate Cavett, Hand-in-Hand Productions)
• Collecting Stories: The Oral Interview in Research (excellent Q&A on how to do an oral history interview, by Marsha MacDowell), The Spoken Word

Transcribing oral history interviews:
• Indexing and Transcribing Your Interviews (Veterans History Project)
• Transcribing Style Guide (Baylor Institute for Oral History, download PDF)
• Transcribing, editing, and processing guidelines (PDF, Minnesota Historical Society). Note that transcripts are not all verbatim--that inessential elements may be omitted ("a judgment call").
• Summaries and Transcriptions (East Midlands Oral History Archive guide to interviewing)
• How do I transcribe oral history recordings? Information Sheet #15, Transcribing and summarising oral history recordings, East Midlands Oral History Archive
• Indexing and Transcribing Your Interviews (Library of Congress, Veterans History Project)
• Transcription and Editing (U.S. Army Guide to Military History)
• The interviewee's right to "edit" a transcript or story (Pat McNees, Writers & Editors -- whether interview sees transcript depends partly on whether you are a journalist, an oral historian, a personal historian, or a collaborator/​ghostwriter)

Places where oral historians gather and chat:
• H-Oralhist is a network and listserv of people interested in oral history--mostly scholars and professionals active in studies related to oral history. Messages (full of interesting info) are readable to nonmembers. You'll find links to other resources at the main Oral History Association site and on the OHA Wiki pages.
• Oral History Noticeboard (UK based, interesting, and livelier in format than the OHA site)

Books About Doing Oral History (a Basic Booklist)
(If you buy anything on Amazon after clicking on one of these links,
we collect a small commission, which helps support this website.)
• Curating Oral Histories: From Interview to Archive by Nancy McKay ("addresses the management, preservation, and access issues" most texts ignore)
• Doing Oral History by Donald A. Ritchie
• A Guide to Oral History and the Law by John A. Neuenschwander (essential for any serious oral history project)
• Oral History for the Local Historical Society, 3rd edition, by Willa K. Baum
• The Oral History Workshop: Collect and Celebrate the Life Stories of Your Family and Friends by Cynthia Hart and Lisa Samson (a primer for those who want to supplement genealogy research with family stories -- with many pages of interview questions on various topics)
• The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, a new book ed. by Donald A. Ritchie (40 authors on the evolution of oral history, the impact of digital technology, the most recent methodological and archival issues, and the application of oral history to both scholarly research and public presentations).
• Recording Oral History: A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences by Valerie Raleigh Yow
• Story Bridges: A Guide for Conducting Intergenerational Oral History Projects a new book by Angela Zusman. You can download an interesting excerpt (PDF) from the Left Coast Press site, clicking on "download excerpt" beneath book image.
• The Tape-Recorded Interview: A Manual for Field Workers in Folklore and Oral History by Edward D. Ives (useful for folklorists and archivists)
• Using Oral History in Community History Projects by Laurie Mercier and Madeline Buckendorf (a 61-page guide).
• They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History, edited by Alessandro Portelli, drawing on 25 years of interviews (reviewed on H-Net by Jessie Wilkerson)
• And as a model for popular social history, check out Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel, whose excellent popular oral history works also include Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (for which teaching guide is available, and The Good War: An Oral History of World War II

“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” ~ Zora Neale Hurston

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Stories about oral history

• A convert to family history . (BBC News, A Point of View 12-2-11). The discovery of a tape recording shed light on a puzzling family photograph which was taken in 1906 - and changed historian Lisa Jardine's views about the genealogy boom. "What a thrill, then, to encounter the miracle of oral history - of having a person in front of you who was actually there."
• Digital scribes transfer ancient words into bits and bytes (Chris Windeyer, Nunatsiaq Online 1-20-10). Technology is being used to capture the traditional knowledge of elders from the Igloolik area about everything from shamanism and kinship to traditional navigation methods and hunting and sewing techniques.
• Hearing Harlan County, an interview with oral historian Alessandro Portelli about his work interviewing people in Harlan County, Kentucky. Listen to Portelli's interviewing advice (American Public Radio).
• Large Scale Digitization of Oral History: A Case History (Eric Weig, Kopana Terry, and Kathryn Lybarger, University of Kentucky). Story of an analog-to-digital reformatting pilot project that explores what can be accomplished with limited funding and a large target collection--the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History: more than 6,500 interviews and 12,000 interview hours.
• Listening Is an Act of Love. Listen to radio interview with David Isay and stories from ordinary people (Storycorps Oral History Project Recording Stories) or read the transcript. Or buy the book: Listening Is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project
• Lives Connected (Peter Mayer's oral history of experience during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath--also an experiment in data visualization).
• Making Sense of Oral History (Linda Shopes's excellent overview of oral history as part of history). Part of the wonderful History Matters--U.S. Survey Course on the Web, by the American Social History Project/​ Center for Media and Learning (Graduate Center, CUNY) and Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (George Mason University). See list of all History Matters resources available online.
• Modern challenges greet oral historians meeting in Little Tokyo (Esmeralda Bermudez, Los Angeles Times, 4-3-11). They collect, preserve and share the voices of the past. Changes in technology could give them a far wider audience — and even more video — if that's what they want. Ethical dilemma: Do they have a right to put online for the world an interview they did sixty years ago, when only scholars would have been likely to listen to the interview or read the transcript?

• Oral histories & interviews (Cyndi's links)
• Oral history projects dedicated to capturing and preserving survivor testimonies (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum links)
• Permanent archive for village thanks to Lottery (Rob Smyth,Burton Mail, UK 1-14-12). A village in East Staffordshire will have a permanent archive of its history and heritage thanks to a £24,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
• Script for Video or Audio Interviews with Family Members (Rootsweb)
• Secrets of a Successful Interview (Valerie Holladay, Holiday Magazine, Jan./​Feb 2005)
• StoryCorps (Every voice matters)
• Studs Terkel and oral history techniques (Chicago Historical Society's excellent links to guides to doing oral histories in the classroom)
• Teaching the Cold War Through Oral History (Donald A. Ritchie, OAH Magazine of History, Winter 1994)
• What can social media do for oral history?. Writing about social media's use to capture oral history, Jim Richardson reviews (for Museum Next) the varying approaches of StoryCorps (recording a conversation between two people who know each other), StoryVault (a UK-based site more likely to collect people's experience of history-changing events), and UK SoundMap (the British Library's attempt to map and archive the sounds of the United Kingdom, using AudioBoo. Fascinating account of the positive effect of widely available new recording techniques and letting regular people create tags for archived items.
• What questions should you ask in a video biography interview? ((Jane Lehmann-Shafron, Video Biography Central)
• YouTube video of Manny Curtis, cartoonist and Jewish war veteran (you hear his voice as you watch him cartooning)

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Further Reading About Oral History

• The Order Has Been Carried Out : History, Memory and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome, by Alessandro Portelli (2003).
Fascinating study of how a Nazi massacre in Rome during World War II (the Ardeatine Caves massacre, 1944) affected three generations of Romans—shedding light on the Italian Resistance movement and on the history of Rome’s working classes.
• The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History by Alessandro Portelli (1991)
• The Business of Memory – The Art of Remembering in an Age of Forgetting, ed. By Charles Baxter (1999)
• Interactive Oral History Interviewing: Essays on the interactive construction (in oral history) of understanding, interpretation, and meaning of lived experience, ed. Eva M. McMahan and Kim Lacy Rogers (2011)
• Memory and History: Essays on Recalling and Interpreting Experience ed. Jaclyn Jeffrey and Glenace Edwall (Institute for Oral History, 1994)
• Social Memory and History, Anthropological Perspectives ed. by Jacob J. Climo and Maria G. Cattell (2002).
Essays on how social memory is constructed, how memory depends on culture and context, how it transmits or contests culture, how it constructs the present and reconstructs the past.
• Oral History in Social Work: Research, Assessment, and Intervention by Ruth R. Martin (1995)

My thanks to Elisabeth Pozzi-Thanner, founder of Oral History Productions, for help preparing this reading list.

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ORAL HISTORY COLLECTIONS ONLINE

• American Life Histories. Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940, Library of Congress, American Memory. More than 300 writers collected 2,900 histories, in transcripts and images. These and some other collections listed here are described more fully on the History Matters website.

• Archives of American Art, Oral History Collection, Smithsonian Institution -- an amazing collection, with transcripts of interviews with many artists

• Archive of American Television (people involved in broadcast history, including TV legends.full list of interviewees.

• Baylor University Institute for Oral History (oral histories and documentaries about Texas history)

• Born in Slavery (Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938)

• Bringing Them Home Oral History Project (National Library of Australia, 1998-2002). A project to collect and preserve stories of indigenous people and others (such as missionaries, police, and administrators) involved in, or affected by, the removal of aboriginal and Strait Island children from their families. (Read overview.. Listen, for example to this this interview with Alice Adams.

• British Diplomatic Oral History Programme (BDOHP) (Churchill and Thatcher Papers, Churchill College, Cambridge)

• British Library Archival Sound Records. These links to public collections include much music and such oral history items as the Millennium Memory Bank, the Opie collection of children's games and songs, interviews from the Common Cold Unit in Salisbury (1957-1990), the St Mary-le-Bow public debates, a survey of local British accents and dialects, and British Wildlife Recordings (oral history of an altogether different type). As for British Library oral history projects, not much is available for listening online, but you can track down what's available in the library or elsewhere, from their collection) and you can pay to have recordings transcribed, after you clear copyright permission.

• Chemical Heritage Foundation Oral History in Sciences (interviews with leading figures in chemistry and related fields)

• Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project

• Coney Island Oral History Project

• Dakota Memories Oral History Project: Germans from Russia Heritage Collection (what it was like growing up second- or third-generation German-Russian on the Northern Plains, with an emphasis on childhood memories and family relationships--with video clips, etc.)

• Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project. Over 500 visual histories (more than 1,000 hours of recorded video interviews) and over 10,800 historic photos, documents, and newspapers document the Japanese American experience from immigration in the early 1900s through redress in the 1980s with a strong focus on the World War II mass incarceration

• Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement, Oral Histories Collection

• Disability Voices (British Library)

• East Midlands Oral History (several collections in the United Kingdom -- online exhibitions)

• Experiencing War (Stories from the Veterans History Project)

• Federal Writers' Project (Library of Congress, 1935-1942). Created in 1935 as part of the U.S. Work Progress Administration to provide employment for historians, teachers, writers, librarians, and other white-collar workers, this project includes American Life Histories, compiled and transcribed by the staff of the Folklore Project of the FWP.

• Florida Voices (Florida oral history collections)

• Frontline Diplomacy (The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training)

• Generation on Fire: An Oral Histories of the 1960s and link on boingboing to PDF of chapter from Jeff Kisseloff's book on the Kent State Massacre.

• Hidden Histories (oral histories documenting the lives of ordinary people from East London--organized by Working Lives--collected by Eastside Community Heritage, an independent charity).

• The History Makers (oral history makers with historically significant African Americans, a collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University Informedia Project). Here's the interview list (you must register to listen, but it's free)

• Holocaust Personal Histories (U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum)

• Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (stories from Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma)

• IEEE Global History Network. Oral histories (for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.) about technologists who changed the world, and about changes in technological companies and institutions.

• In the First Person (an index to nearly 4,000 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world--letters, diaries, oral histories, and personal narratives)

• In Their Own Words (NIH researchers recall the early years of AIDS)

• The Interview Project (film producer David Lynch's project--a new video interview every few days).

• In Their Words: AETN's WWII Oral History Project (testimony from Arkansas's WWII generation)

• Japanese American Oral History Project (University of California, Fullerton)

• The jobbing system of the London Stock Exchange (42 interviews, Institute of Historical Research, University of London’s School of Advanced Study)

• Kentuckiana Digital Library. The Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries, is a motherlode of oral histories on various subjects: African American political scientists, Bourbon in Kentucky, the Kentucky Family Farm project, From Combat to Kentucky, Frontier Nursing Service, Kentucky's Community Colleges, the Horse Industry, City Hall, the Kentucky Legislature, Kentucky Transportation Center, Peace Corps Volunteers, the Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Project, and various Kentuckian individuals of note.

• Legacy Project (oral histories of long-time employees and executives of PNC Bank)

• Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (James Leloudis and Kathryn Walbert, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) Hundreds of interviews with working-class southerners conducted by the Southern Oral History Program Piedmont Industrialization Project of the late 1970s and early 1980s, combined with other resources.

• Lives Connected (an oral history of our experiences during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath--and an experiment in data visualization)

• Listening Is an Act of Love (StoryCorps' National Oral History Project)

• Marin County (California) oral histories (Anne T. Kent California Room of the Marin County Free Library, over 400 oral histories of Marin County pioneers and residents from all walks of life, from dairy ranchers to philanthropists)

• May 4 Collection (Kent State, documenting the May 1970 Kent State Shootings)

• Mountain Voices (interviews with over 300 people who live in mountain and highland regions in Mexico, Peru, Lesotho, Kenya, Ethiopia, Poland, Pakistan, India, Nepal, and China)

• National Park Service Oral History Collections. See also Park Histories (National Park Service documents). You can download "Directory of Oral History in the National Park Service" (PDF)

• New York City, Ellis Island Oral Histories, 1892-1976 (searchable database, along with things like ships' passenger lists, ship images in NY ports, petitions for naturalization, etc.

• Nevada Test Site Oral History Project

• Oral Histories of the American South (Southern Oral History Program)

• Oral History Centers and Collections Oral History Association's excellent links)

• Oral History Project of the Social Security Administration (SSA)

• Patient Voices digital stories from Pilgrim Projects (stories of patients, carers, healthcare practitioners and managers)

• Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) (Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley). Rotating offerings, include oral histories about the Free Speech movement, disability rights, the Earl Warren oral history project, the medical response to the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco (1981-84).

• Prototype Online: Inventive Voices (podcast series), Lemelson Center Video and Audio clips, and Computer Oral History Collection, resources available at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention & Innovation, at the the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History)

• Repositories of Primary Sources (over 5000 websites describing holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources for the research scholar, compiled by Terry Abraham)

• RICHES of Central Florida (Regional Initiative for Collecting the History, Experiences and Stories of Central Florida)

• Rutgers Oral History Archives

• Sephardic American Voices: A Jewish Oral History Project (actively collecting through 2015)

• Slavery, U.S. (University of Washington links to primary and secondary sources on)

• Sound Portraits (listen online to several StoryCorps stories)

• StoryCorps Stories

• StoryCorps Griot Project to record stories of African Americans (partner: National Museum of African American History and Culture)

• Studs Terkel, Conversation with America (listen to a master interviewer interview ordinary people and those better-known, such as Cesar Chavez)

• Telling Their Stories (oral history projects conducted by high school students, with Holocaust survivors and refugees, WWII camp liberator/​witnesses, Japanese American internees, residents of San Francisco's Fillmore District, and elders who witnessed the struggle to achieve voting rights for blacks in the 1960s) -- sponsored by the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS)

• Testimony (inside stories of mental health care, Mental Health Media)

• 376th Heavy Bombardment Group Oral Histories (World War II veterans based in North Africa and later in southern Italy)

• Uniuted Nations Oral History Collection (Dag Hammarskjold Library, audio files and transcripts)

• U.S. Latino & Latina World War II Oral History Project (University of Texas at Austin)

• U.S. House of Representativs

• U.S. Senate Oral History Project, which oral historian Donald Ritchie talks about in an informal oral history interview conducted by Verusca Calabria (he says, for example, that senators and their staffs do not have to promise secrecy about what goes on behind the scenes in the Senate.

• Veterans History Project (huge collection of personal accounts of American war veterans, collected, preserved, and made accessible so future generations will know the realities of war, from World War I through current conflicts)

• VHP's links to other oral history sites about war-related experiences of veterans and civilians

• Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (excerpts edited by Maxine Hong Kingston)

• Voices of Civil Rights

• Voices of Feminism Oral History Project (Women's History Archives at Smith College)

• Voices of the First Coast (oral histories from Northeast Florida)

• Voices of the Holocaust (British Library collection)

• The West Point Center for Oral History (stories of the American soldier, in war and peace, in development)

• What Did You Do in the War, Grandma? (Rhode Island women during World War II)

• Witness to War: Preserving the Oral Histories of Combat Veterans

• Women of Four Wars (Veterans History Project)

• Women in Journalism (Washington Press Club Foundation Oral History Project)

• World War I Document Archive

• World War II Submarine Veterans History Project (California Center for Military History)

• You'll find more projects to look up in this list of Oral History Association award winners.

Organizations for Oral Historians

• Association of Personal Historians (APH (oral historians helping ordinary people tell their stories)
http:/​/​www.personalhistorians.org
• Columbia Center for Oral History
(formerly The Oral History Research Office at Columbia University
https:/​/​blogs.cul.columbia.edu/​ohro/​
• The Healing Story Alliance
http:/​/​www.healingstory.org/​
• Oral History Association of Canada
http:/​/​www.canoha.ca/​
• Oral History Association, Australia
http:/​/​www.ohaansw.org.au/​
• Oral History Society, UK
http:/​/​www.oralhistory.org.uk/​
• Narrative Medicine Program (Columbia University)
http:/​/​www.narrativemedicine.org/​
• U.S. Regional and International History Associations
http:/​/​www.oralhistory.org/​about/​regional-organizations/​
• International oral history links (Elisabeth Pozzi-Thanner, Oral History Productions)

Places where oral historians gather and chat:
• H-Oralhist is a network and listserv of people interested in oral history--mostly scholars and professionals active in studies related to oral history. Messages (full of interesting info) are readable to nonmembers. You'll find links to other resources at the main Oral History Association site and on the OHA Wiki pages.
• Oral History Noticeboard (UK based, interesting, and livelier in format than the OHA site)

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Books to help you get started
writing your own (or someone else's) life story)

Several booklists

Writing Personal and Family Histories (a booklist)

These are books for people who (generally) do not see themselves as writers but want to write something about their life or their family.

• Breathe Life into Your Life Story: How to Write a Story People Will Want to Read by Dawn and Morris Thurston. Advice and examples on “showing” rather than "telling," creating credible interesting characters and settings, writing from the gut, alternating scene and narrative, and generating suspense.

• For All Time: A Complete Guide to Writing Your Family History by Charley Kempthorne. Charley’s wise, loveable, encouraging personal style and long practical experience make this a good book to give to someone you want to encourage, if only to write for the family. He makes it all seem human and doable. “The facts, or at least the important facts, of mom and dad’s marriage were not where and when it took place but what they made of it.”

• The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing: How to Transform Memories Into Meaningful Stories by Sharon Lippincott. A personal historian's "roll-up-your-sleeves" guide to writing and publishing your own (or someone else's) memoirs or autobiography.

• Keeping Family Stories Alive: Discovering and Recording the Stories and Reflections of a Lifetime by Vera Rosenbluth. Interviewing and recording techniques helpful for family histories.

• Legacy: A Step-By-Step Guide to Writing Personal History by Linda Spence. A very popular guide for doing oral histories and personal and family histories, with memory prompts that encourage storytelling more than fact-finding: What were you like as a child? What did you think? What did you do? Organized by topic, from earliest memories, school life, young adulthood, marriage, children, grandchildren, through later life.

• The Legacy Guide: Capturing the Facts, Memories,and Meaning of Your Life by Carol Franco and Kent Lineback. Moving from facts to memories to meaning, this book takes you through the seven stages of life: childhood, adolescence, young adulthood (roughly 20-30), adulthood (roughly 30-45), middle adulthood (roughly 45-60), late adulthood (roughly 60-80), elder (roughly 80 onward). Fairly sophisticated writing prompts, and examples from fine writers, invite you to recall forgotten moments and discover their significance.

• Living Legacies: How to Write, Illustrate, and Share Your Life Stories by Duane Elgin, Colleen Ledrew. Emphasizes illustrating your stories with photographs, memorabilia, and other images (including digital format).

• The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life by Marion Roach Smith. Get the gist of this slim book from her interview on NPR's Talk of the Nation: 'Memoir Project' Gives Tips For Telling Your Story. From the opening pages: "There is an old saying that most men would rather have you hear their story than grant their wish."

• Start & Run a Personal History Business: Get Paid to Research Family Ancestry and Write Memoirs by Jennifer Campbell. How to make money doing something you love. Members of the Association of Personal Historians can also purchase four special toolkits for personal historians: 1) Get Your Personal History Business Up and Running; 2) The Interview: Record and Develop the Story; 3) Products and Services; 4) Marketing: APH Members Share Ideas That Work.

• Story Bridges: A Guide for Conducting Intergenerational Oral History Projects by Angela Zusman. A concept and a process. Download an excerpt (PDF) from the Left Coast Press site, clicking on "download excerpt" beneath book image.

• Turning Memories into Memoirs: A Handbook for Writing Lifestories by Denis Ledoux. Workshop in a book, encouraging nonwriters to write their own stories, by a founding member of APH.

• You Can Write Your Family History by Sharon DeBartolo Carmack, who, starting from a genealogy base, offers tips on how to bring characters and social history to life and present stories about people on the family tree.
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Memoir Writing As Discovery (a booklist)

• Shimmering Images: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir by Lisa Dale Norton. A slim, well-written book focused on the slice-of-life memoir. Norton encourages you to find "memory pictures," find your voice and the heart of your story, identify one potent period of your life, and “explore it through vivid imagery, honest voice, stunning compassion, and a deep awareness of the larger issues at play that guide your story in a subliminal way—myth, metaphor, and current issues of the day.”

• Storycatcher: Making Sense of Our Lives Through the Power and Practice of Story by Christina Baldwin. Says Baldwin (whose workshops are inspirational): “Our life story is our constant companion, the litany that guides our every move and thought. So we need to make our lives a story we can live with, because we live the life our story makes possible.” She encourages storytelling to build community, webs of connection, bridges to understanding, using the “voice of story” to call us to remember our true selves.

• White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory by John Kotre. Interesting insights--for example, "what we believe we accurately remember often has been reconstructed, as when an event that initially evoked fear and anger is later recalled as a hilarious adventure" (Booklist review)

• Writing from Life: Telling Your Soul’s Story by Susan Wittig Albert. Albert (founder of Story Circle Network) encourages women to discover their voices and grow spiritually by putting their stories into words. Her guide invites women on a voyage of self-discovery, by exploring eight thematic clusters: beginnings and birthings; achievements, gifts and glories; female bodies; loves, lovers, lovings; journeys and journeying; homes and homings; visits to the Valley of Shadows; and experiences of community. She also explains how to form women’s Story Circles.

• Writing Life Stories: How To Make Memories Into Memoirs, Ideas Into Essays And Life Into Literature by Bill Roorbach. Intelligent commentary and exercises to help you access memories and emotions, shape scenes, develop plot lines, populate life story with "characters," and bring depth to your memoir or personal essay.

• Writing Your Life: A Journey of Discovery by Patti Miller. A helpful companion for structuring book-length life writing, with wise counsel on remembering (and selective memory), emotional healing, finding one's voice, choosing details, creating drama, and imposing structure. Australian writer, but the book seems easily available online. By the same author: The Memoir Book, which one writing student said was exactly what she needed to get going on her memoirs.

• Your Life as Story: Discovering the "New Autobiography" and Writing Memoir as Literature by Tristine Rainer. This highly recommended guide, full of exercises, asks you to think about your life and about how best to write a life story. Some object to her de-emphasis on historical accuracy, but many praise her for her handling of such topics as story structure (how best to organize the story of your life), how to handle the passage of time, and the ethical problems of writing about family and friends.
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Memoirs, Healing, and Self-Understanding: A reading list • Another Morning: Voices of Truth and Hope from Mothers with Cancer by Linda Blachman. A book for parents challenged by serious illness, to help and inspire them to leave stories and messages for the children who will survive them. • The Beneficial Effects of Life Story and Legacy Activities by Pat McNees (Journal of Geriatric Care Management, Spring 2009). Get PDF file of journal article here (61.9KB) • Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir by Sue Williams Silverman. In addition to covering traditional writing topics well, Silverman encourages writers to transform their life story into words that matter. She advocates finding the courage to speak truth about issues on which others might prefer silence. Her own confessional memoirs are about incest (Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You) and sexual addiction (Love Sick). • The Healing Art of Storytelling by Richard Stone. This classic and insight-provoking guide to finding coherent narratives in our life experiences, recently out of print, is now available again. Not about memoir but about understanding the storylines of our lives. • Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir by Jane Taylor McDonnell. In this little book, McDonnell focuses here on how to write "crisis memoirs," finding "our own meaningfulness, even in the midst of sadness and disappointment." In addition to teaching a related college course ("Witness Narratives: Memoirs of Survival"), she has written about life with her autistic son and about her own problems with alcoholism. • Narrative Medicine by Rita Charon. The idea behind the field of narrative medicine, which Charon helped create, is that the doctor's job is to listen and by hearing the patient's story to know the patient more fully than numbers on a chart can convey. You'll find more resources on narrative medicine here, including books by Arthur Kleinman, Lewis Mehl-Madrona, and Arthur Frank. • The Power of Memoir: How to Write Your Healing Story by Linda Joy Myers. Step-by-step memoir writing, with healing from emotional pain as a goal; full of interesting psychological insights. • The Story of Your Life: Becoming the Author of Your Experience by Mandy Aftel. Geared more to self-understanding than to memoir writing, this book is still useful for life writing. Focusing on what Aftel calls the three major life plots (love, mastery, and loss), she provokes reflection on things like How Money Complicates the Love Plot, How Children Complicate the Marriage Subplot, and How Escape Complicates the Mastery Plot. • Writing and Healing: “The Best Therapy I’ve Had” (Sharon Lippincott's article about how a memoir writing class helped recovery from a brain injury, Women's Memoirs 6-26-11) • Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives by Louise DeSalvo. Cautioning that writing is no substitute for medical care, DeSalvo (who wrote about her own pain, anxiety, and depression in Vertigo: A Memoir) recommends writing five pages a week, uncensored, in spare moments, reporting every detail, to speed healing -- and sharing with other empathetic writers, to sharpen narrative. She refers often to James W. Pennebaker's Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, based on his 10 years of clinical research. "Dr. Pennebaker has demonstrated that expressing emotions appears to protect the body against damaging internal stresses and seems to have long-term health benefit," wrote Daniel Goleman, in the NY Times. • Memoirs of illness, crisis, disability, differentness, and survival (a reading list)

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Writing from Memory Prompts (a booklist)

Those for whom writing seems a daunting task can often respond to simple, straightforward, or inspirational memory prompts. Books featuring such prompts vary greatly in the style of prompts (from simple fact-finding questions to prompts that probe for emotional memories to prompts that liberate the imagination).

• Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir by Natalie Goldberg author of the popular Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Message: Put pen to paper and write as fast as you can for ten minutes, in “writing ‘sprints’ that train the hand and mind to quicken their pace and give up conscious control.” For those having trouble getting started.

• Thinking About Memoir by Abigail Thomas. A tiny volume of writing prompts which encourage writer to write brief bits, coming at your life at an angle, through the "side door," as she does in her slim, fine memoirs (A Three Dog Life (about caring for her husband after a hit-and-run accident shatters his skull) and Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life show how vignettes and snippets artfully arranged can convey the arc of a changing relationship, or relationships.

• To Our Children's Children: Preserving Family Histories for Generations to Come by Bob Greene. A small book of writing prompts for oral or written family histories -- one of the first of its kind.

• Writing Your Life: An Easy-to-Follow Guide to Writing an Autobiography by Mary Borg. A slim, spiral-bound, illustrated, easy-to-maneuver workbook (good for senior centers) with questions and memory joggers to tease out a life story, and excerpts from real autobiographies.

• You Are Next In Line: Everyone's Guide for Writing Your Autobiography by Armiger Jagoe. A slim, very simple do-it-yourself guide with brief extracts from famous life stories to illustrate broad themes: In the Beginning, Family Affairs, First Home, Early Years, Grown Up, Adult Life, Special People, Humor, Important Events and Life Passages.

• Life's Little Writing Prompts (online, Story Circle Network writing prompts)

• Women's Memoirs writing prompts (online; click on "previous entries" at bottom to find earlier entries)

Five anthologies of life story writing and reminiscence

• My Words Are Gonna Linger: The Art of Personal History ed. by Paula Stallings Yost and Pat McNees, with a foreword by Rick Bragg, a great gift for that person whose life stories should be recorded or told but who keeps saying, "Who cares what happened in my life?" Read excerpts here and order here to order directly from APH. Backstories about the process of getting the stories into print will be of particular interest to those who want to help others tell their life stories. "At last, a collection that shows the 'why, what, and how' behind memoir as legacy." ~ Susan Wittig Albert, author of WRITING FROM LIFE, founder of Story Circle Network

• Pulse: Voices From the Heart of Medicine - The First Year, ed. Paul Gross and Diane Guernsey (excellent essays, poems and short narratives from the hearts and in the voices of patients and their health care providers, from the online magazine Pulse)

• Listening Is an Act of Love, edited by Dave Isay (stories about home and family, work and dedication, journeys, history and struggle, and 9/​11), from the StoryCorps Project. Second in the series: Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from StoryCorps. (Listen to Isay on moms on NPR's Democracy Now:“Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from StoryCorps".

• Born Before Plastic: Stories from Boston’s Most Enduring Neighborhoods(Vol. 1: North End, Roxbury, and South Boston) and My Legacy Is Simply This (Vol. 2: Charlestown, Chinatown, East Boston, and Mattapan), from Grub Street’s Memoir Project (giving seniors a chance to turn their memories into published narratives).

• Not Quite What I Was Planning, NPR's delightful slideshow of images and text from the book Not Quite What I Was Planning:Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure, edited by Rachel Fershleisher and Larry Smith, based on the six-word memoirs of the storytelling magazine Smith.
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The Art and Craft of Memoir and Biography (a booklist)

• The Art of Time in Memoir (Then, Again) by Sven Birkerts. The great memoirists often break the rules, especially about mixing present and past tense. “Apart from whatever painful or disturbing events they recount, their deeper ulterior purpose is to discover the nonsequential connections that allow those experiences to make larger sense; they are about circumstance becoming meaningful when seen from a certain remove.”

• The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries by Marilyn Johnson. A delightful account of how those final stories get told.

• Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography ed. William Zinsser. Thoughtful talks (and biography shop talk) by Robert A. Caro, David McCullough, Paul C. Nagel, Richard B. Sewall, Ronald Steel, and Jean Strouse.

• How To Do Biography: A Primer by Nigel Hamilton (a brief interpretive history of life stories, or at one reviewer called it, "a zesty romp through millennia of biographical portraits" -- not really a "how to" book)

• I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory by Patricia Hampl. Explores the act of memoir-making, the tension between memory and forgetting (inventiveness as part of the search for emotional truth), the art of storytelling, and the value of the first draft, as a mystery dropping clues about the narrator's feelings.

• Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir , ed. William Zinsser. Excellent talks by Russell Baker, Annie Dillard, Alfred Kazin, Toni Morrison, and Lewis Thomas.

• Naked, Drunk, and Writing: Shed Your Inhibitions and Craft a Compelling Memoir or Personal Essay by Lara Adair. Helpful especially for memoirists who want to craft personal essays--by a popular columnist and writing coach/​instructor.

• Writing a Book That Makes a Difference by Philip Gerard. Though not geared to memoir-writing, Gerard presents insights and examples that could help elevate your memoir above a string of anecdotal memories.

• Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past by William Zinsser. Using his own story as an example, this expert on writing well shows how to be selective in choosing the stories to tell and the details to use.

• Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art by Judith Barrington. Memoir-writing basics (present vs. past tense, first vs. third person, balancing the needs for accuracy and good storytelling, etc.)
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BOOKS FOR LIFE STORY WRITING OR REMINISCENCE GROUPS

Reminiscence and life review, especially guided by someone who knows how to make the most of the experience, is an important developmental phase, in which we older adults take stock of our lives and, with luck, begin to see both pleasant and unpleasant memories as part of what shaped our identity. With aging, retirement, divorce, widowhood, and separation from our children, we lose roles we once played and may experience less sense of identity and self-worth. Life review, however done, can be therapeutic, and in groups, under a masterful leader, can also be enormous fun. Good groups bond. Creative juices flow. Hearing each other's stories brings back our own often forgotten memories, good and bad, which in the presence of sympathetic others can be healing.

Two books I have found particularly useful and interesting in terms of how to run such a group (including how to deal with disruptive, self-absorbed, or shy participants):

• Birren, James E. and Donna E. Deutchman, Guiding Autobiography Groups for Older Adults: Exploring the Fabric of Life. Writing about your life two pages at a time. Provides questions (as writing prompts) on different themes, transitions: On the major branching points in your life, on family, on major life work and career, on the role of money in one's life, on health and body image, on sex roles and sexual experiences, on experiences with and ideas about death, on loves and hates, on the meaning of life (aspirations and goals), on the role of music, art, or literature in your life, and on your experiences with stress. Participants in GAB groups write a two-page story each week, on one of these themes. (Cheryl Svensson and Anita Reyes offer online classes as well as online training for GAB instructors in the Birren approach, a ten-week session that gives you a sense how the process works. A great place to start.)

• Kaminsky, Marc, ed. The Uses of Reminiscence: New Ways of Working with Older Adults. Interesting reading even if you don't plan to lead a reminiscence group for elders, and useful if you do.

You may also find these books helpful:

• Schneider, Pat. Writing Alone and With Others (an update of The Writer as an Artist, by the founder of the Amherst Writers and Artists Press and workshop method in Amherst, Massachusetts)

• Transformational Reminiscence: Life Story Work, by John A. Kunz, Florence Gray Soltys, and others, provides professional insight into the process of helping older adults with reminiscence and life review.

• Forget Memory:Creating Better Lives for People with Dementia, by Anne Davis Basting. A powerful antidote to the notion that memory loss = loss of identity, and a reminder that people with dementia lead better lives when they can express themselves and feel heard. You need better ways to help them than asking questions that require a good memory to respond.

Anecdote (Australia, "Putting stories to work") offers a free download of Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles (PDF, a practical guide to facilitating storytelling and story listening). A blog entry criticizing a Steve Denning video about radical management for not telling stories also offers a Storytest to see if you can spot a story. Good site for insights into storytelling for businesses.

• Teaching Life Writing Texts, ed. Miriam Fuchs, Craig Howes. A new book that looks useful only for academic courses where the focus is STUDYING life writing.

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Anecdote (Australia, "Putting stories to work") offers a free download of Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles (PDF, a practical guide to facilitating storytelling and story listening). A blog entry criticizing a Steve Denning video about radical management for not telling stories also offers a Storytest to see if you can spot a story. Good site for insights into storytelling for businesses.

Selection from
STARTING OVER
by Herman Sheets with Pat McNees

"Although Oskar [Kraus] was one of the more famous members of the family, my grandmother continued to think of him as her idealistic and impractical younger brother, always in need of her unsolicited advice. As I recall, she summed up his friends, efforts, and accomplishments like this: “First Oskar gets interested in and spends most of his career writing about Brentano. He could have picked someone noncontroversial to spend his time on, but no, he has to pick Brentano, the only professor to ever be expelled from the University of Vienna. And why was Brentano expelled? Because in 1894 he decided to argue that the Pope was not ‘infallible,’ a remarkably stupid thing to do in Vienna, the self-appointed capital of the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire.

“Next, what does Oskar get involved in? He supports hiring at the University of Prague some controversial civil servant from the Swiss Patent Office who isn’t even a lawyer. This Einstein wants to change all the laws of physics! First of all, no one understands anything he talks about. Everyone knows about Newton and the apple, how does he refute that? I don’t even think Oskar believes what Einstein is saying.

“Then Oskar gets involved with all those Czechoslovak nationalists. You know, like that former professor, Tomáš Masaryk, and his like-minded friends. The fact that both Masaryk and Oskar studied in Vienna with that expelled Professor Brentano clearly indicates that they have no practical sense. Also, anyone with any sense knows that the biggest tragedy of the Great War was the break-up of the Austrian Empire into all these silly little countries with no history and no culture!

“And as for his friend Albert Schweitzer, well at least he is not controversial. He has a lot of degrees and is well intentioned, but, like Oskar, has no practical sense. He is off in Africa so no one has any idea what he is doing or who he is.

“And finally, Oskar makes friends with Bertrand Russell in England. What good is a friend like him? He’s the most controversial person in the universe. What can you say about a mathematician who thinks he is a philosopher?”

~From Chapter 1, “Life in Germany and Czechoslovakia.”
Click here to order STARTING OVER

BACK JACKET COPY: Hermann Chitz's life, which began quietly in 1908 in the Kingdom of Saxony, was to span a century and two continents. He escaped to America from Hitler's Europe; his parents, assimilated Jews, stayed behind. With a Prague doctorate and patent in hand, he landed in New York in 1939, and changed his name—starting over as Herman Sheets. In wartime he worked on critical aspects of the atomic bomb that would end the Second World War. In peacetime he directed research and development for Electric Boat's nuclear submarine program. At the peak of his career, in a single year, his wife died unexpectedly and he was fired for displeasing Admiral Hyman Rickover. As a single parent, with three of his six children still at home, he started his career over again in the University of Rhode Island. Not until his own children were educated and launched did he remarry and take on an expanded family. This is the remarkable story of an immigrant, inventor, ocean engineer, technical consultant, and family man who consistently turned difficult transition into new beginnings. center>From Chapter 1, “Life in Germany and Czechoslovakia.”
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SELECTIONS FROM THE MEMOIRS OF DR. THOMAS McNAIR SCOTT
the late Philadelphia pediatrician-researcher-educator

Following are extracts from My Century by the late pediatrician, medical educator, and medical researcher Thomas McNair Scott (reprinted here by permission):

"Delivering babies in the poor parts of Dublin was quite an experience. You went into the room, drove out the chickens, and delivered the baby. Very often the new father would ply you with whiskey. I managed to escape the whiskey. On the first delivery I made, instead of a baby I found a rare condition called a hydaditiform mole, a cancer of the placenta. I was very proud that I recognized it and called the hospital for help."

***

"My fellowship at the Thorndike was to end in June of 1931, but in the spring of that year the recently founded American Pediatric Society held its annual meeting in Atlantic City. Child care as a separate discipline was introduced to America in the mid 19th century by Abraham Jacoby, a German doctor, practicing in New York. Noting the poor care that children were receiving, Jacoby had made the care of children the basis of his practice, initiating such things as pasteurization of milk and immunizations. He must have taught other doctors to follow his example for he was appointed professor of child health at the New York College of Medicine in 1861. From this beginning arose the group of doctors who became pediatricians, but the first pediatric organization in the United States, the American Pediatric Society, wasn't founded until 1928. I had enjoyed my six months' training in child health at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in London very much so I decided to go to Atlantic City to attend the pediatric meeting. I traveled down from Boston by train, more than an eight hour journey. While at the meeting, I fell in with some students from Johns Hopkins and, seizing the opportunity, I asked them if I could hitch a ride with them to Baltimore. Thus it was that I took part in the discussion of cases at the weekly 'Grand Rounds' with Dr. Edwards A. Park, one of the country's leading pediatricians.

"Shortly after I returned to Boston, I received a letter from Dr. Park, asking if I would be interested in a job as the resident in the pediatric outpatient department. It seems that the resident he'd chosen for Outpatient care had come down with tuberculosis and had been sent to a sanitarium. I quickly replied to him that I was very interested but that I had had only six months' experience in pediatrics. He took me anyway."

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"Medical knowledge and treatments have changed since the days I was a resident at Hopkins. When I entered pediatrics, for example, the standard of medical care called for treating cases of infants with pneumonia by bundling them up and sending them with devoted nurses to sleep in the fresh air on the roof. Also, at that time, many children had mastoiditis from middle-ear disease, which then required emergency surgical intervention, mastoidectomy. Now both of these diseases are treated, and indeed prevented, with antibiotics, but in those days there were no antibiotics.

"There was a real resistance to change when I was in training. Medicine had a nihilist mind set. While Fleming had discovered penicillin in 1927, and had shown that it killed bacteria in the petri dish, nobody in clinical medicine had taken notice of it. Although Salvarsan, an arsenical, had been shown to cure syphilis in 1903, no other advances were made in the control of infectious diseases until 1935, when Domack discovered Sulfanilimide with its powerful therapeutic antimicrobial action. Then, with the Second World War coming on, clinical medicine rediscovered penicillin and Flory initiated full scale production of the antibiotic, which became available for U.S. Army use only, in the early 1940s. The Army used it to cure syphilis, which was prevalent during the war. After the war, penicillin became widely used and the mindset changed.

"Attitudes toward pediatric patients have also changed. In the 1930s, when I was a resident, children were kept in the hospital for a very long time, to get over whatever illness they had. Their parents were rarely allowed to visit, only once a month, for fear they would introduce infection into the hospital. In addition, in a study of hospitalized infants who were cared for in every way except that they weren't held, most of those babies failed to thrive and many of them died. That study called attention to the importance of touching and love in the care of infants. In the 1950s, a knowledgeable psychiatrist at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, John Rose, realized that strict visiting rules were a mistake. Thinking that the nurses might object to any change in their routines, he persuaded them to try parental visiting three days a week. The nurses, soon realizing how much more quickly the children recovered, and how much burden having the parents there took off them, came to Dr Rose and asked, "Can't we have it every day?" This major change was not recognized as a real therapeutic advance at the time, and Rose died of complications from diabetes shortly after daily visits became routine at the Children's Hospital. But in my mind, this was a major advance in child care, which subsequently has became standard practice through out most of the world.

"We often discovered things as we worked. Cardiologist Helen Taussig, for example, ran the cardiac clinic for Dr. Park. She saw numerous babies with Tetralogy of Fallot, who were blue at birth for lack of oxygen, because their veins and arteries were transposed. She suggested that if one could surgically switch the vein and artery, these 'blue babies' could be saved. Dr. Blalock, a surgeon at Hopkins, was persuaded to try this operation. It was successful, and the baby being operated on turned from blue to pink. This procedure, the Blalock-Taussig operation, introduced cardiac surgery for babies and Dr. Taussig became known as the blue-baby doctor."
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OBITUARIES AND OBIT WRITING

• Alt.obituaries ("notices of dead folks"), an online group for obituary lovers

• Obituary Forum (blog for the Society of Professional Obituary Writers (and fans)

• The Late Show with Gordon Pinsent (an unconventional take on the art of the obit — CBC radio documentaries of a range of Canadians, from a street kid with dwarfism to an elderly man obsessed with sailing through the Northwest Passage)

• The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries, a delightful book by Marilyn Johnson, whose website is here.

• Society of Professional Obituary Writers administered by Alana Baranick, author of Life on the Death Beat: A Handbook for Obituary Writers

• Obituary search engines and indexes at libraries, universities, and societies (Ancestor Hunt's obituary search portal)

• Links to obituary sites for over 800 newspapers in North America, Europe, and Australia

• Obit Magazine (good reading online, for those who want more on the subject, including exemplary obits!)

• Good Bye! (the late Journal of Contemporary Obituaries (archives 1996-2002)

• Adam Bernstein on the difference between British and American obits and a link to the Telegraph (U.K.) obit page, with its distinctive obit style

• Post Mortem (a Washington Post blog about "the end of the story") and an Editor & Publisher story about Post Mortum: 'Washington Post' Obit Blog Creates Death Stars.

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