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