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

Posts Tagged Personal History


  • A Triple Header Video Interview

    Over the holiday week between Christmas and New Year, my family spent a week skiing in Utah. We stayed at the home of some good friends who live outside of Salt Lake City and another family from California was there as well. We have known the parents of thes...

    Read more  ●  Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

  • Childhood Holiday Memories

    Flickr photo:SkillsUSA Massachusetts When I worked on my own autobiography several years ago, I used this technique which I sort of invented ( I say that because I’ve never heard of anyone else using it either in my background as a social worker or spe...

    Read more  ●  Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

  • Creating an Oral History to Preserve Unique Life Stories

    Flickr photo: c-weiss First of all, what is oral history? Put simply it is a collection of testimonies by living persons to record their unique life stories. They are not based on gossip, hearsay or rumors. Instead, oral histories are chronicles of direct ob...

    Read more  ●  Monday, December 3rd, 2007

  • Effective Interviewing Techniques for Video Histories

    Flickr Photo: Walter Grubmuller While every interviewee is unique in his or her own way, there are several things you can do in advance to help make the process go more smoothly to yield better results. There are also some proven techniques that can be appli...

    Read more  ●  Thursday, January 10th, 2008

  • Every Memory of Your Life Stored Forever – MyLifeBits Project

    Gordon Bell What would it look like if you had a computer with every single memory stored on it forever? You would be able to access every webpage you’ve ever looked at, every email you’ve read, every photo you’ve taken or been in, videos o...

    Read more  ●  Friday, April 4th, 2008

  • 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 Cookbooks

    I don’t know if this is a new trend or not but I’ve been noticing an abundance of family memoir cookbooks. These cookbooks will typically serve up recipes that have been passed down from one generation to another along with photos of the family, s...

    Read more  ●  Tuesday, November 6th, 2007

  • From Nashville – It’s the lovin’ of the game

    I am writing this post from my hotel room in Franklin Tennessee, just outside Nashville, where I am attending the Association of Personal Historians annual conference. I’ve just wrapped up a whirlwind day of workshops, networking, video shares, personal...

    Read more  ●  Saturday, November 10th, 2007

  • From Nashville – Listen

    The theme of this year’s Association of Personal Historians conference is “Listen.” When I looked up the word listen in the dictionary, the main definition was “hear” although there was a footnote explainig that: “to listen...

    Read more  ●  Sunday, November 11th, 2007

  • Hope Chest

      A Hope Chest was originally used as a dowry. It was property that a woman owned and brought into her marriage. Some women could not find a suitable husband, for various factors; therefore, the dowry was used as a way of enticing a man into marriage. Th...

    Read more  ●  Monday, November 24th, 2008

  • Old Letters and New History

    For a good part of my life, i had a tin cracker box filled with old letters. Most of these were letters sent to me by old boyfriends, away at college or otherwise separated from me and declaring their affections. There were also some letters from friends off...

    Read more  ●  Monday, March 24th, 2008

  • Photo Albums Don’t Hold the Memories, People Do

    This past summer I stayed at a bed and breakfast in Colorado. It was a beautiful, well-restored Victorian home and in the parlor, hung many turn-of-the-century photos of the home and of some its residents. I asked the proprietor if she knew who the people wer...

    Read more  ●  Wednesday, November 21st, 2007

  • 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

  • Reminisces On My Recent Trip to Turkey

    I just took a look at my blog this morning and realized it’s been almost 4 months since I wrote anything. My commitment has always been to try for twice a month and I have alerts set on my calendar to remind me of that commitment. I think that after fi...

    Read more  ●  Wednesday, October 29th, 2014

  • 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

  • Researching Your Family History – Part 2

    This is a continuation of my post from last week on researching your family history. There are also many other blogs that focus on tracing family histories, restoring old photos, converting aging materials to newer formats and sharing your fondest memories wi...

    Read more  ●  Thursday, November 8th, 2007

  • StoryCorps 1st Annual National Day of Listening, November 28

    Tomorrow we sit down with our family and friends to give thanks for all we have, personally as well as collectively. I recently read an article where the average organic Thanksgiving dinner costs an additional $100 more than a non-organic dinner. Organic or ...

    Read more  ●  Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

  • Studs Terkel – National Storyteller, Gone at 96

    Those of us in the personal history business feel a strong calling to help other people tell their stories. I’m not really sure where it comes from but you ask anyone who is doing this type of work and it’s a common theme. We all believe in the p...

    Read more  ●  Saturday, November 8th, 2008

  • 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

  • Ted Grant And The Art of Observation – Video Biography and APH Speaker

    Growing up and living in the United States, I had never heard of Ted Grant or been exposed to his photojournalism, so I was not really sure who this keynote speaker was at the Association of Personal Historians 2010 Conference in Victoria BC earlier this mon...

    Read more  ●  Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

  • 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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