A friend of mine lost his job last year and hasn’t been able to find another. But he recently splurged, spending several hundred dollars on a video camera.
Why? His mom celebrated her 88th birthday, and although she’s healthy, he worries about how long that will last. He wants to create a video history of his mother’s life and times while they can both enjoy the experience.
Another friend of mine wasn’t so far-sighted. He waited until his mother was admitted to the hospital suffering from heart failure to quiz her about the past. She hated it and accused him of “trying to kill me with these questions.” She took the family’s history with her to the grave.
Everyone has a story to tell. If we don’t collect and preserve our family’s stories, one day they disappear forever. Lamenting their loss becomes an exercise in futility.
But, experts say, the good news is that the holiday season provides an ideal opportunity to dive into family history. The intimate round-the-dinner-table gatherings of Christmas and Hanukkah spur storytelling. And storytelling conveys exactly what we want: a first-hand recounting of names, experiences and places. We hear our family’s history from the people who lived it.
Chronicling these stories can be an amazing adventure, oral historians say.
“I got a better sense of who I was when I interviewed my mother,” says Alva Moore Stevenson, who discovered intriguing details about her mom’s World War II service in the Women’s Air Corps. Her mother belonged to one of the few all-black female regiments in the war.
Stevenson is a pro when it comes to conducting these interviews; she’s the program representative for the UCLA Center for Oral History Research. But her academic findings didn’t lessen the personal value of the interview with her mom: “I found out a lot of things that flushed out the family history. And my mother enjoyed the process too.”
Most people enjoy telling their story, says Barbara Tabach, who specializes in what she calls “LifeCatching” ( www.lifecatching.com), preserving histories of clients. “I’ll walk into an interview with an elderly person and hear them complain about being achy, lonely or sad. But I set up a mike and a whole new person emerges. You can actually see a physical change when they get a chance to talk.”
Most of the people involved in oral history research have stories of their own to tell - of deeds of heroism, loves lost and found, fortunes earned and spent. Much of the time, they say, sons, daughters, grandchildren or great-grandchildren have little knowledge of these family dramas.
“After they’re gone, you always realize there’s so much you don’t know. And at that point there’s nowhere to go to find out,” says oral historian Karen Harper of Long Beach.
Getting started can be as simple as taking notes with pen and paper, or as elaborate as double-teaming a video session, with someone acting as camera operator while someone else asks the questions.
Regardless of format, just do it, says Harper, who founded Tell Me Your Story, an oral history project sponsored by the Historical Society of Long Beach that trains students to interview seniors.
“The rule of thumb is to use the best equipment you can afford,” Harper says. “A video camera offers a much richer end product, but if you can only afford to use a tape recorder or to take notes, then do that.” Or, she adds, try an inexpensive video recorder such as the Flip.