I keep meaning to come back here and write some more for those of you who read regularly or those who happen to find me. But I feel as if I’ve pretty much said everything there is to say on the topic of Family History, Video Biographies, Tribute Videos, capturing your family stories and every single aspect of why it should be important to you and why it will be important to your descendants. Some of you get it, some don’t see the value and some get it well after you’ve read about my services. Often times you get it too late. I can only preach so much.
So at this point, this blog contains tons of wonderful articles from how to do things yourself to ideas for gathering your family together and getting them telling stories. I invite you to poke around and of course, please leave me a comment or send an email if you’re inspired by what you’re reading. For the time being, (and actually for some time in the near past) I will not post new content to this blog. I might change that at a later date but right now, “that’s all she wrote.”
Mind you, I am still actively involved in helping my clients capture their stories. But I”m also really interested in Genealogy and am doing a lot of work with that, both for my clients as well as for my own family. I’m doing a lot of archiving and have been working with one family for over a year and a half now, helping them get all their media organized and archived. I’ve always been interested in empowering young girls and am now helping organize a conference this spring to provide some wonderful presentations for young girls to see what’s available to them and show them some amazing role models. I’m interested in learning and mastering HDR photography. You can look that up, it’s too complicated to explain here. So I’m forever learning, exploring and enthusing about my passions, I’m just not going to write about them for awhile, at least not here.
Last week I watched the documentary “The Salt of the Earth” about documentary photographer Sebastião Salgado. This is one of those films that I can’t stop thinking about, which is a good thing.
For those that aren’t familiar with Salgado’s work, he is a Brazilian photojournalist and social photographer that has traveled the world photographing indigenous cultures and the social effects of major geo-political actions on these areas. Largely self-directed, these photo shoots have been published into large-format books that have helped raise awareness of mankind’s effect on human communities.
The film, co-directed by Wim Wenders and Salgado’s son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado deftly weaves interviews with Salgado, footage of him shooting, and exploration of his photo sessions with commentary by Wenders, Salgado’s wife Leila as well as his son Juliano. Much of the film is shot in black and white, reflecting Salgado’s choice of shooting in black and white although some fade to color sequences are there, which provide for some great dramatization and a reminder of why black and white can be so effective for documentary photography. There has been some criticism by reviewers that this film doesn’t explore his methodology nor explore the greater social implications of his work. I don’t find that a problem with this film. First of all, going in those directions could turn this into a docu-series and secondly, Wenders’ aim is more to provide a glimpse into an extremely talented and sensitive man and how his passion for exploration and documenting the human condition has led him on a 40 year global tour. I like the slow, almost moseying pace of the film for it allows the audience to really savor the impact of the images as well as to be present with Salgado’s own emotional affect.
I’m not exactly sure how long it took to make this film but you got the impression that Wenders has followed Salgado for much of his adult life, which allowed for a great time-line of personal narrative. Some really good film techniques were used to support Salgado’s actual photographs such as the use of other photos and film clips taken during photo shoots, and special effects such as Salgado’s face fading into a photograph he was talking about.
I hope this movie is available near you. I would imagine at some point, it will be available on streaming platforms, but for now, you might check with your own museum or independent film theater.
For the past few weeks I have been involved in a back and forth phone tag with a potential client.
Each time he’s called me, I returned the call, and each time I called, he wasbusy and told me he would get back to me. A couple weeks ago he asked me to send him some more information about my work so I sent him a flyer, and links to several video clips and testimonials. But we never actually had “the conversation” about what he was looking for, how I could help him, and how soon we could get started.
He is a busy man, I get it. I actually have conversations like this all the time. The children are busy with their careers, their families, and their parents’ mortality is not a pressing concept.
Well I found out last night that this man’s father passed away yesterday. He became ill Friday night and by Sunday he was gone. I met his father a few times. He was a lovely man and seemed so vital when I saw him not too long ago.
There are no words to describe my sadness over his loss of his father. The family’s time will be taken up this week in the process of completion and then into mourning. And it may be a long while before they are at a place where I often find people. When they walk up to me and say, “I wish I had met you (insert time) six months ago, before I lost my father.”
“I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.”— Banksy
While this quote was directly attributed to the graffiti artist Banksy, the sentiment is not his alone and appears all over the place, attributed to several different people.
For instance:
“Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?”― Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
And
“There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”― David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
I’ve read that ancient Egyptiansbelieved that once your name vanished from people’s memories, you were truly dead.That this complete erasure was comparable to an eternity in hell.
People are remembered by their legacy, whether it’s public or private. If something you did lives on in the public consciousness, then your name stays relevant and you, (your memory) become immortal.
With the work I do in video biographies, my goal is to create a work of art about your life that lives on into perpetuity, continually speaking your name as well as your accomplishments, thoughts, visions and goals into future generations of your family. By this, our wish is that your descendants who have yet to be born, will know you and understand who you are and that years down the line, your name will still be spoken and you will be remembered.
My grandmother used to make these amazing cookies for special occasions. They are called Franz Joseph Cookies and supposedly took their name from the famous Emperor of Austria. I’m not really sure the back story on how my grandma got this recipe but it was a family favorite and one that had great pomp and circumstance around the making of the cookies. She resisted giving the recipe to anyone for many years and finally when she was well into her late 80s, she gave me the recipe. When I make them, I use her gifted and typed recipe that is yellowed and stained with cooking splatters. I posted the recipe for these wonderful cookies several years ago. Feel free to bake them and make sure to tell grandma thanks! (The photo on that page is her in her kitchen when she was in her 80s, still cooking up a storm.)
Recently my sister, an extremely talented and published poet, wrote a poem about the making of these cookies. It was published by Red Paint Hill Publishing in the anthology, “Mother is a Verb,” released May 2014. The poem poignantly evokes the memory of these cookies and of my grandmother and I hope you will enjoy reading this poem as much as I do.
APRICOT PRESERVES
Alicia Elkort
All summer, I sleep on a foldaway
in my grandparents’ living room,
against the open window,
the torn mesh screen
patterning the trees
outside. At night,
I breathe
wisps of jasmine and honeysuckle,
fall asleep to the dewy patter of crickets.
Lightly grease two cookie sheets.
Before sunup,
Grandma wakes me,
a brush of lips
on the crown
of my head.
I stretch my body long
to the scent of eggs,
toast and oranges.
By six a.m. we’re in
the old Dodge Dart
with blue plaid seats,
windows rolled down,
Grandma and Grandpa
in the front seat,
bookends to my little self
lodged between them,
the cool air beginning to warm.
Grate hazel nuts finely and set aside.
As we drive the empty freeway,
I take my grandfather’s hand.
Los Angeles disappears,
replaced by wheat colored hills,
cow-dotted pastures, horses,
fences, then row
upon row
upon row
of trees that fly by like a memory.
Grandpa turns onto a dirt road,
tires churning, crunching gravel,
the released whisper of each tiny
rock a hello and a welcome. We
park underneath an olive tree,
approach the foreman of the orchard.
He hands us a large cardboard box.
Grandpa counts out five one-dollar bills.
Whatever fits in the box will belong to us.
I climb ladders, scramble up rough-barked
trunks, reach across leaves and pluck
apricots from their branches,
slipping the furry globes into the box,
taking something I won’t have to share.
Sift flour, cinnamon and cocoa together.
An apricot with the blush of red
makes especially good jam.
I fill my cardboard box
only with apricots
with the blush of red.
What doesn’t fit, I stuff
into my shorts and jacket
when no one is looking.
Blend groundnuts into mixture.
On the drive home,
the remnants of peanut butter and jelly
on hand made whole-wheat bread
surround me as I lay across the backseat,
my hair drifting into the box of apricots
nestled on the floor.
I grab an apricot,
slowly chew the moist flesh,
throw the pit out the open window
and reach for another
and another
until I fall asleep to the rhythm
of the susurrant engine.
When cookies are cool, turn one half of them upside down and spread ½ tsp apricot jam on each.
Later that night, Grandma
leans into the sugared
dough, her hair hidden
beneath a red bandana,
hands covered in flour.
Place another cookie on top and squeeze together lightly.
I look over at my grandfather
reading on the couch, his thick
hair parted on the side, combed
into a wave across his brow. In a quiet
voice, Grandma tells me she had
other suitors, but Grandpa was the most
handsome. He looks up, smiles at Grandma,
turns to me, rolls his eyes, then laughs.
During the week,
he repairs washing machines. At night,
every night, he reads National Geographic.
Dip tops of cookie sandwiches in chocolate.
I lean into the dough,
touch my grandmother’s hands—
I love the feel of the soft fleshy parts
soft as the skin of an apricot,
soft as kindness.
Press a whole blanched almond into the top of each cookie. Then enjoy.
When the cookies
come out of the oven,
we three sit at the table
lit by candles, cleared
of the remnants of dinner.
We sip black tea
while eating cookies,
the wafers made of hazelnuts,
topped with chocolate and almonds,
all held together with apricot jam.
Years later, when
my grandmother is dying,
I take her hands and rub
the soft fleshy parts. I rub until
the moment blossoms
into the sweetness of jasmine
and the earthy oozing orchard
and the hot drive home
and the hazelnut dough
and the apricot jam
and the sweat of her perfect love.
Stefani Twyford is a video biographer in Houston Texas whose mission is to help families, individuals, companies and organizations chronicle history, share life stories, connect generations and preserve their legacies in timeless, high-quality multimedia presentations. Read more about Stefani...
Fully committed to sharing her knowledge, vision and talents with others in the genealogy and oral history groups, communication arts industry and technology community, Stefani Twyford is available for speaking engagements.
If you would like to arrange for her to speak to your group, contact us.
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QUOTES
"The stories that we tell ourselves function to order our world, serving both a foundation upon which each of us constructs our sense of reality and filter through which we process each event that confronts us every day. The values that we cherish and wish to preserve, the behavior that we wish to censure, the tears and dread that we can barely confess in ordinary language, the aspirations and goals that we most dearly prize--all of these things are encoded in the stories that each culture invents and preserves for the next generation, stories that, in effect, we live by and through." Henry Louis Gates Literary Critic, Scholar, Writer and Teacher Chair: African American Studies at Harvard University
“In truth a family is what you make it. It is made strong, not by number of heads counted at the dinner table, but by the rituals you help family members create, by the memories you share, by the commitment of time, caring, and love you show to one another, and by the hopes for the future you have as individuals and as a unit.” The Single-Parent Family: Living Happily in a Changing World by Marge Kennedy and Janet Spencer King. New York: Crown, 1994
“By looking into another person’s life, you need to look into your own. Whether you are the biographer or whether you are the reader. It’s like truth is stranger than fiction. When I am reading a biography, there is something more rewarding about reading about a real person’s life, rather than fiction.” On Writing Biographies: Kevin Fitzpatrick interviews Marion Meade about Buster, Woody, Zelda, and Mrs. Parker for Small Spiral Notebook
“The art of interviewing is as personal as the art of writing. Every reporter brings a different demeanor and skill to the job of interviewing ... But all interviews are designed to accomplish one mission: Get information to advance a story. This is best achieved with organization and preparation, whether it's a five-minute phone interview or a two-hour confrontational affair.” Les Zaitz, Senior Investigative Reporter for The Oregonian from his tip sheet on interviewing
"The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn’t discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip." Leon Edel, U.S. biographer, critic. Interview in Writers at Work, Eighth Series
"Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Those rewards create almost as many problems as they solve. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter so the world will at least be a little bit different for our having passed through it." Rabbi Harold Kushner
"The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it." Benjamin Disraeli
"All the natural history required to understand consciousness is now readily available in evolutionary biology and psychology. Gene networks organize themselves to produce complex organisms whose brains permit behavior; further evolution enriches the complexity of those brains so that they can create sensory and motor maps that represent the environments they interact with; additional evolutionary complexity allows parts of the brain to talk to each other (figuratively speaking) and generate maps of the organism interacting with its environment. Within the frame of those interactions, the conversation among the maps spontaneously and continuously tells the "story" of our organism responding to and being modified by the environment. (The story is first told without words and is later translated into language when language becomes available, both in biological evolution and in every one of us.)" Antonio Damasio
A Story We Tell Ourselves
Time Magazine 1/18/2007
"In all of us there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage - to know who we are and where we came from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness." Alex Haley, Roots
"We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium." Ansel Adams
“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.” Dickens, David Copperfeild,
p. 2 1850 edition
Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean- the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Mary Oliver - The Summer Day
“Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we are, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.” Harlan Ellison
"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." John Lennon
"When a parent dies, it's the end. I always wanted to chronicle the family history with my mother. She was always interested in that. I wanted some researchers I'd worked with to talk to my mother, but my mother was a little antsy about it. I know she would've gotten into it. It would have been okay with my father, too. But I wasn't forceful, and I didn't make it happen. That's one regret I have. I didn't get as much of the family history as I could have for the kids. " Robert de Niro, quoted in Esquire
