How to Preserve Your Family History by Writing Family Stories
“Everyone has a story to tell.” It seems like a clichebut it’s
true. After working as a newspaper reporter for more than eight
years, I know that everyone does, indeed, have a story to tell.
But even before I started working as a journalist, I knew that
life experiences make interesting stories. Consider my parents.
My mother was the daughter of Norwegian immigrants, and her
grandfather homesteaded our dairy farm in Wisconsin in the late
1800s. My father was the son of German and Scottish immigrants.
When Dad was a little boy, his parents worked as cooks in a
lumber camp in northern Wisconsin. As I was growing up, Mom and
Dad would tell stories about their own childhoods. When Mom was
a little girl, the whole family would sleep in the screen porch
on hot summer nights. Indians also used to stop at our farm, and
gypsies would camp nearby during the summer. When Dad was a
little boy, he enjoyed spending time at the lumber camp kitchen
because all of the cooks knew that little boys needed special
treats during the day: a piece of Key Lime pie, a slice of
chocolate cake, or a couple of extra-large sugar cookies. When
Dad wasn’t staying with his parents at the lumber camp, he lived
with his grandmother, a tiny tough-as-nails German woman who
owned a German shepherd named Happy.
Unfortunately, I never wrote down any of those stories, and I
never asked Mom and Dad to sit down with a tape recorder and
tell those stories. My mother died in 1985 at the age of 68, and
my father passed away in 1992 at the age of 78. The majority of
their stories, except for the few that I remember, are lost
forever. Your family stories do not have to share the same fate.
Here are some tips for writing your family stories:
• Decide which person you want to interview first (Grandma or
Grandpa, Mom or Dad, Aunt or Uncle), and then tell that person
about your plan to write a collection of family stories and ask
for permission to conduct an interview.
• Set a formal date and time for the interview. This will give
your interviewee an opportunity to mentally prepare and to
remember various stories that he or she would like to talk about.
• Provide a list of questions several days or weeks before the
interview. This will also give your interviewee time to remember
various stories.
• Focus on a single subject or event in your list of
questionsschool, holidays (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of
July), birthdays, seasons (spring, summer, winter, fall)the
list is endless.
• Ask open-ended questions and not “yes or no” questions. “How
did you get to school?” is better than “Did you walk to school
when you were growing up?”
• Use a tape recorder to record the interview. Taping the
interview will help you gather details that you might miss if
you are only taking notes.
• Chat about something else for a while if the person you are
interviewing seems nervous at the prospect of being
tape-recorded. Your interviewee will soon relax and won’t even
notice the tape recorder. And once you start the interview, you
will find that one subject will lead to another and one question
will lead to another.
• Transcribe the tape and write up your notes after you have
finished the interview. This, in itself, will provide a fine
record of the stories that are told “in their own words.” And
you will be in good company. Studs Terkel’s oral history books
are written that way, and they are fascinating to read. Terkel’s
books include Division Street (1967), Hard Times (1970), Working
(1974), The Good War (1984), The Great Divide (1988), and RACE
(1992).
• After you have finished all of your interviews and have
written down the stories, print the stories from your computer
and put them into a three-ring binder. Make multiple copies and
give them to family members as gifts. Or you might want to
consider publishing the stories POD (print-on-demand). There are
many POD companies, and for a price that starts out at a couple
of hundred dollars, you can publish the stories as a trade
paperback. To find POD companies, conduct an Internet search
with the keywords, “print-on-demand.”
Here are some examples of questions to help you get started with
your interviews:
Subject: school
1. Where did you go to school when you were growing up? 2. Tell
me about any amusing or unusual incidents that happened on your
way to or from school.
3. What kinds of clothes did you wear?
4. How many students were in your class? How many students were
in the whole school? How many grades?
5. What was your favorite subject? Why?
6. What was your least-favorite subject? Why?
7. Who was your favorite teacher? Why?
8. Who was your least-favorite teacher? Why?
9. Tell me about your best friend.
10. Tell me about your happiest moments in school. What was your
best accomplishment?
11. Tell me about your worst moments in school. Did you learn
anything from your worst moments?
12. What advice would you give to students who are in school
today?
