Pat McNees, writer, editor,
personal historian

Everyone has a story to tell but many of us need help telling it — or finding the time to collect and record the stories of other family members. Once we overcome shyness or modesty, however, we almost all enjoy reminiscing. Once we reach a certain age 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.

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. 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.

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).

[Go Top]

OBITUARIES AND OBIT WRITING

---

[Go Top]
Sources for music, images, video clips and other useful material

If you are making professional productions for sale and for profit, you will probably 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 on music.

[Go Top]

TIMELINES, ARCHIVES, FAMILY HISTORY, GENEALOGICAL AND OTHER HISTORICAL RESOURCES

There are also useful links about archiving and preservation in section just above this one.

[Go Top]

DOING ORAL HISTORIES

[Go Top]

BOOKS TO HELP YOU GET STARTED WRITING YOUR OWN LIFE STORY

If you buy or borrow only one book, I'd start with Tristine Rainer's.

· Rainer, Tristine. Your Life as Story: Discovering the "New Autobiography" and Writing Memoir as Literature. An excellent guide to memoir writing that probes well below “First I did this and then I did this,” asking you to think about your life. Some object to her de-emphasis on historical accuracy.

· Franco, Carol and Kent Lineback. The Legacy Guide: Capturing the Facts, Memories,and Meaning of Your Life. Moving from facts to memories to meaning, this guide takes you through the seven stages of life, to recall forgotten moments and discover their significance. Good examples.

· Baldwin, Christina. Storycatcher: Making Sense of Our Lives Through the Power and Practice of Story. Says Baldwin, “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.”

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

· Mary Borg.
Writing Your Life: An Easy-to-Follow Guide to Writing an Autobiography. Questions to tease out a life story, writing tips, and excerpts from real autobiographies.

· Duane Elgin, Colleen Ledrew.
Living Legacies: How to Write, Illustrate, and Share Your Life Stories. How to write your stories and illustrate them with photographs, memorabilia, and other images (including digital format).

· Linda Blachman Another Morning: Voices of Truth and Hope from Mothers with Cancer. 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.

· Hamilton, Nigel. How To Do Biography: A Primer

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

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

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

· Kotre, John. White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory. Interesting insights.

· McDonnell, Jane Taylor. Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir. With a special emphasis on writing "crisis memoirs," finding "our own meaningfulness, even in the midst of sadness and disappointment." (This book may be hard to find.)

· Spence, Linda. Legacy: A Step-By-Step Guide to Writing Personal History. Useful memory prompts.

· Rosenbluth, Vera. Keeping Family Stories Alive: Discovering and Recording the Stories and Reflections of a Lifetime. Good on interviewing and recording techniques.

· Kempthorne, Charley. For All Time: A Complete Guide to Writing Your Family History. An encouraging guide.

· Ledoux, Denis. Turning Memories into Memoirs: A Handbook for Writing Lifestories. Workshop in a book.

· Zimmerman, William. How to Tape Instant Oral Biographies: Capture Your Family's Living History

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

Biography: A User's Guide, by Carl Rollyson

[Go Top]

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):

· 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.

· Birren, James E. and Donna E. Deutchman, Guiding Autobiography Groups for Older Adults: Exploring the Fabric of Life. Provides questions to provoke discussions 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.

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.

Two new anthologies are filled with examples of reminiscence:

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

Born Before Plastic: Stories from Boston’s Most Enduring Neighborhoods (Vol. 1: North End, Roxbury, and South Boston), from Grub Street’s Memoir Project (giving seniors a chance to turn their memories into published narratives).

Here's a new book that looks useful only for academic courses in which students are STUDYING life writing:

Teaching Life Writing Texts, ed. Miriam Fuchs, Craig Howes

From the memoirs of Thomas McNair Scott, the late Philadelphia pediatrician

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."

***


"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."
[Go Top]