Oral Histories and Family Legends

Everyone has them. Every family from Adam’s family right down through history to your own family, we all have those peculiar little stories that Granny tells or those fancy yarns full of boasting that you can pry out of Grandpa with a few “Pretty pleases”. Some are very close to the truth and some have been handed down and embellished through the repeated tellings. We always called them “stories” or “yarns” but lately, with the surge in genealogy and family history, more and more people are calling them “Oral Histories”.

The art of obtaining an oral history has really changed over the years also. Most family historians are well past the age of hopping on a beloved grandparent’s lap and asking for a story. So now we get our fancy recorders and video recorders, make lists of questions, take all kinds of photos and other memory prompts, and “interview” an older person.

I guess we get the same results but it was so much more fun the old way! But a lot of us are to the point where we wish and wish that we would ever had paid attention to all those old stories. Most of us would give anything just to spend one day with Granny or hear one more story from Gramps. Oh, dear, if only ……

Well, enough of that! We can’t go back but we can plan ahead now. There are things we will probably never get to know now that this one or that one has passed on. The thing we need to do is stop this from happening again and again in the future. Get those stories now and get as many as you can and get them down in writing SOMEWHERE!! Put them in your blog, in your journals, in your family history books; put them down in writing, in slideshows, in video format, any way available to you but get them down SOMEWHERE! Put them in several, separate places also – give them to your siblings, your cousins, your local historical museum or family history center, or your local genealogical society. These things are important and really are much more than just some old stories.

There are hundreds and thousands of articles, commentaries, websites, and so forth dedicated to the whole concept of Oral Histories. There are almost as many ways to obtain the information and preserve it as well as present it to your family and the world. Informal interviews with living family members are oral histories in themselves. When you are just beginning your quest in finding your ancestors, you need to start with your current family and work backwards. You don’t start with Adam and work this way!!! Soon your pedigree chart will be growing and growing, and your genealogy files will be multiplying like no other project you’ve attempted in the past! You will get into the habit of grabbing all sorts of notepads, old envelopes and even napkins to write down some gem from the past that someone throws your way! Your filing system will completely collapse. Your family will start to run the other way when they see you coming. And your brain will start shutting down whenever you get that gleam in your eye!!

In the Heritage Scrap chat on Tuesday, June 09, 2009, we will start discussing how to add to our beginning pedigree charts and family histories by using the techniques of interviewing and obtaining oral histories – both formal and informal. After the chat, I will be posting some links – some general and some more specific – about the art of oral histories. We will also be discussing “Family Legends – Fact or Fiction??” and ways that we can substantiate or dispel the old stories.

We will be interviewing or even just talking to someone on our pedigree chart or to someone about a person on our chart. Then we will journal that story and present it as a scrapbook page or as a written document. Anyone placing their work into the Heritage Scrap Gallery and using more than 50% Heritage Scrap products will be eligible for a prize drawn randomly from all entrants.

In the weeks to follow, we will be honing our interviewing skills along with exploring other ways to get the information we long so to obtain about our elusive but very intriguing ancestors!