Tributes & Video Biographies
Sharing Life Stories, Connecting Generations, Preserving Legacies

Posts Tagged Family History


  • 2014 Memory Jar Project

    2014 Memory Jar I have been reading about the concept of “Happiness Jars.” In Elizabeth Gilbert’s blockbuster memoir “Eat, Pray, Love” she started a project where she would write down things that have made her happy each day on l...

    Read more  ●  Tuesday, December 31st, 2013

  • Family Business

    The idea of creating a family history or genealogical tree, while a formidable task, sometimes occurs to us as quite simple. We enroll all our family members into this meaningful project. They all go through their media, (photos, old reels of film, mementos)...

    Read more  ●  Saturday, January 26th, 2008

  • Family History at Family Dinner Table

    I was reading a blog posting at the Science of Raising Happy Kids where the author, Christine Carter, Ph.D. suggested wrote, “Research shows that telling stories about your shared past creates strong and secure emotional bonds, which directly impacts h...

    Read more  ●  Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

  • Family Photo Album

    I met this guy at a party the other night and when I told him that I was a personal historian and biographer, he became really, really excited. He said to me, “I have to show you this album I did with my son for his 5th grade class project. ” He...

    Read more  ●  Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

  • More on Geni.com and My Genealogical Family Tree

    Late last year I started a family genealogy tree on Geni.com and blogged about what exactly Geni is. Recently my parents were in town visiting and my dad and I sat down for a couple of hours at Geni.com, armed with an old genealogical tree that I had roughly ...

    Read more  ●  Monday, May 5th, 2008

  • Photographs or Snapshots?

    Typical snapshot taken of my son. My father, Martin Elkort, is a collected and noteworthy photographer. His body of work, shot during a period of enormous possibility in our country, evokes feelings of both excitement and nostalgia in those that view and col...

    Read more  ●  Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

  • Researching Your Family History – Part 1

    Tracing your roots, discovering your origins, getting to know your ancestors and learning of your cultural past is a richly rewarding experience that can benefit you and your family for many generations to come. This is especially important in today’s highl...

    Read more  ●  Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

  • Survey Reveals Americans’ Surprising Lack of Family Knowledge

    Flickr photo: johnewootton Latest Ancestry.com Survey Shows How Little Americans Know About Their Families; Holidays Perfect Time to Get to Know Family Better PROVO, Utah, Dec. 6 /PRNewswire/ — Are you among the one-third of Americans who cannot name ...

    Read more  ●  Saturday, December 8th, 2007

  • Texas Governor’s Mansion Damaged by Fire

      This weekend, the historic Texas Governor’s Mansion caught fire and much of the 152 year old structure was seriously damaged. Arson is suspected and an investigation is under way. Fortunately, at the time, the mansion was undergoing a $10 million...

    Read more  ●  Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

  • Thanks For The Memories

    Shortly after my husband Loren and I married, we moved to San Francisco to start our new careers and new life. As the moving van was pulling up in front of our new apartment, we noticed two small children sitting on the stoop of the apartment two doors down. ...

    Read more  ●  Thursday, November 15th, 2007

  • Tim Russert writes of fathers’ advice and love

    From MSNBC Article: In his book, ‘Wisdom of Our Fathers,’ the ‘Meet the Press’ host shares stories from daughters and sons about lessons they learned from their dads. After Tim Russert’s book about his father, “Big Russ & Me,” became a bes...

    Read more  ●  Thursday, November 29th, 2007

  • Transferring 8mm & 16mm film to DVD

    We get a lot old format film transferred to DVD work and I wanted to take the time to discuss this service and our perspective on it. Lots of you have boxes of old film laying around in the closets. Some of you have projectors but most of you don’t and...

    Read more  ●  Monday, February 25th, 2008

  • Trusting Your Film & Photos to a Service Provider

    I was at a networking event a couple nights ago and had a great conversation with two gentlemen about a variety of issues; personal, domestic and global. At some point, we began talking about our services and what specifically we do at Legacy Multimedia. One...

    Read more  ●  Thursday, February 28th, 2008

  • SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS

    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

      • WELCOME

      Stefani Twyford 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...

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