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13 Steps to Preserve Your Family History
By LeAnn R. Ralph
Although the phrase, "everybody has a story to tell" may sound
like a cliche, it's true.
And after working as a newspaper reporter for nine years, I know
that everyone does, indeed, have a story to tell, including your family members.
Think about it.
Do your grandmother and grandfather — mother and father — aunts
and uncles — tell stories about the "good old days?"
Do they talk about going to school? The fun they had with
friends? Family celebrations and holidays? Picnics on the Fourth of July? Snow
that was so deep it covered fences? Pets that were so smart they belonged in the
Guinness Book of World Records? Making ice cream? Their parents? Their
grandparents?
Have you wanted to write down those stories to share them with
other family members and to preserve them for generations to come but don't how
to go about it?
Guess what? You don't need "literary talent," special training
or special equipment. All you need to preserve those stories is a list of people
to interview, a willingness to listen, a set of questions to ask, a tape
recorder and a computer (or even a typewriter would work!).
Here are the steps for gathering and writing your family
stories:
1.
Decide which people you would like to interview and make a list.
2. Ask
for permission to conduct an interview.
3. Set
a formal date and time for the interview.
4.
Provide a list of questions several days or weeks before the interview.
5.
Focus on a single subject or event in each list of questions.
6. Use
the “who, what, where, when, how, and why” strategy when formulating your
questions.
7. Ask
open-ended questions and not “yes or no” or “one word answer” questions.
8. Use
a tape recorder to record the interview.
9. Chat
about something else for a while if the person you are interviewing seems
nervous at the prospect of
being tape-recorded.
10.
Transcribe the tape and write up your notes after you have finished the
interview.
11.
Edit the manuscript.
12.
Spread out your interviews.
13.
Print the stories from your computer or publish them in another way.
*Preserve Your Family History* includes step-by-step instructions for conducting
interviews as well as 30 sets of questions (more than 400 questions in all) on
30 different topics that you can print out to use "as is" or that you can use to
generate your own questions. To see the table of contents and several sets of
sample questions visit —
http://www.ruralroute2.com/family_history.html
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