2009 July : Legacy Multimedia Blog

Legacy Multimedia Blog

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

Finding Your Family Online

Posted on July 23, 2009 - Filed Under Family Memories, Geneaology, Networking, Personal History, Social Media | Leave a Comment

Flickr photo:mweitkamp

In the news yesterday is a story about a couple who are engaged and planning to wed soon. What makes this story really unusual is that they have the same name, Kelly Hildebrandt, and they met on Facebook.
One night (female) Kelly was bored and typed her name into Facebook to see what came [...]

What Calls Us To These Personal Histories

Posted on July 16, 2009 - Filed Under Family Memories, Geneaology, Personal History, Preserving Memories | 1 Comment

Flickr photo:lost in translatn

I have to admit that I don’t find the History Channel very interesting. My husband watches it constantly and aside from something that occasionally catches my eye, I find most discussions of political, military and social history rather boring. I am horrible at remembering dates and while I can recount the presidents [...]

How Much Should You Pay A Personal Historian?

Posted on July 13, 2009 - Filed Under Business History, Family Memories, Personal History, Preserving Memories | 2 Comments

Dan Curtis, my friend and fellow Personal Historian in Victoria, BC, recently penned this excellent blog posting on determining the costs of a personal history. This article tackles head-on, the perceived discrepancies of pricing when shopping for a historian. From the buyer’s point of view, it can often be difficult shopping for this service as [...]

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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

"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

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