2008 October : Legacy Multimedia Blog

Legacy Multimedia Blog

Musings on personal history, video biographies and other digital tributes.

Legacy Lists - Organizing The Family Information

Posted on October 19, 2008 - Filed Under Family Memories, Media Archiving, Personal History | Leave a Comment

Flickr photo:neloqua

I recently realized that while my two sons are grown, 25 and 22, my will lists my brother as the executor of my estate. My oldest son lives here in Houston and it has occurred to me that I need to start grooming him to be my executor, showing him where all the [...]

The Three Dynamics of Personal Histories

Posted on October 7, 2008 - Filed Under Family Memories, Geneaology, Networking, Personal History, Photos & Snapshots, Social Media, Social Responsibility, Video Tributes | Leave a Comment

Flickr photo: Kingsnake

Since October is Family History Month, I was already thinking about this subject for a new blog article when a Canadian writer and film producer named Robb Lucy asked that I make a contribution to his new book. Scheduled for publication in the Spring of 2009, it is tentatively titled “Legacies [...]

About Me

Stefani Twyford is a video biographer living in Houston, Texas. She is the managing partner of Legacy Multimedia, a company committed to the art of acknowledgment through the medium of video. Speaking on the subject of personal and oral history, Stefani has appeared on Wild About Houston, Ken Hoffman's radio show The Game, and as a guest on KPRC Channel 2 News.

Follow her on Twitter as stefanitwyford.
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"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