Preserve Your Family History by Writing Family Stories
“Everyone has a story to tell.” It seems like a cliche—but it’s true. After working as a newspaper reporter for more than eight years, I know that everyone does, indeed, have a story to tell.

But even before I started working as a journalist, I knew that life experiences make interesting stories. Consider my parents.

My mother was the daughter of Norwegian immigrants, and her grandfather homesteaded our dairy farm in Wisconsin in the late 1800s. My father was the son of German and Scottish immigrants. When Dad was a little boy, his parents worked as cooks in a lumber camp in northern Wisconsin. As I was growing up, Mom and Dad would tell stories about their own childhoods. When Mom was a little girl, the whole family would sleep in the screen porch on hot summer nights. Indians also used to stop at our farm, and gypsies would camp nearby during the summer. When Dad was a little boy, he enjoyed spending time at the lumber camp kitchen because all of the cooks knew that little boys needed special treats during the day: a piece of Key-Lime pie, a slice of chocolate cake, or a couple of extra-large sugar cookies. When Dad wasn’t staying with his parents at the lumber camp, he lived with his grandmother, a tiny tough-as-nails German woman who owned a German shepherd named Happy.

Unfortunately, I never wrote down any of those stories, and I never asked Mom and Dad to sit down with a tape recorder and tell those stories. My mother died in 1985 at the age of 68, and my father passed away in 1992 at the age of 78. The majority of their stories, except for the few that I remember, are lost forever. Your family stories do not have to share the same fate.

Here are some tips for writing your family stories:

• Decide which person you want to interview first (Grandma or Grandpa, Mom or Dad, Aunt or Uncle), and then tell that person about your plan to write a collection of family stories and ask for permission to conduct an interview.
• Set a formal date and time for the interview. This will give your interviewee an opportunity to mentally prepare and to remember various stories that he or she would like to talk about.
• Provide a list of questions several days or weeks before the interview. This will also give your interviewee time to remember various stories.
• Focus on a single subject or event in your list of questions—school, holidays (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July), birthdays, seasons (spring, summer, winter, fall)—the list is endless.
• Ask open-ended questions and not “yes or no” questions. “How did you get to school?” is better than “Did you walk to school when you were growing up?”
• Use a tape recorder to record the interview. Taping the interview will help you gather details that you might miss if you are only taking notes.
• Chat about something else for a while if the person you are interviewing seems nervous at the prospect of being tape-recorded. Your interviewee will soon relax and won’t even notice the tape recorder. And once you start the interview, you will find that one subject will lead to another and one question will lead to another.
• Transcribe the tape and write up your notes after you have finished the interview. This, in itself, will provide a fine record of the stories that are told “in their own words.” And you will be in good company–Studs Terkel’s oral history books are written that way, and they are fascinating to read. Terkel’s books include Division Street (1967), Hard Times (1970), Working (1974), The Good War (1984), The Great Divide (1988), and RACE (1992).

After you have finished all of your interviews and have written down the stories, print the stories from your computer and put them into a three-ring binder. Make multiple copies and give them to family members as gifts. Or you might want to consider publishing the stories POD (print-on-demand). There are many POD companies, and for a price that starts out at a couple of hundred dollars, you can publish the stories as a trade paperback. To find POD companies, conduct an Internet search with the keywords, “print-on-demand.”

Here are some examples of questions to help you get started with your interviews:

Subject: school

• Where did you go to school when you were growing up?
• Tell me about any amusing or unusual incidents that happened on your way to or from school.
• What kinds of clothes did you wear?
• How many students were in your class? How many students were in the whole school? How many grades?
• What was your favorite subject? Why?
• What was your least-favorite subject? Why?
• Who was your favorite teacher? Why?
• Who was your least-favorite teacher? Why?
• Tell me about your best friend.
• Tell me about your happiest moments in school. What was your best accomplishment?
• Tell me about your worst moments in school. Did you learn anything from your worst moments?
• What advice would you give to students who are in school today?

About The Author
LeAnn R. Ralph is a freelance writer for two newspapers in west central Wisconsin, is the editor of the Wisconsin Regional Writer (the quarterly publication of the Wisconsin Regional Writers’ Assoc.) and is the author of the book, Christmas In Dairyland (True Stories From a Wisconsin Farm) (Aug. 2003); trade paperback. For more information about Christmas In Dairyland, visit ruralroute2.com.  bigpines@ruralroute2.com

One of the most rewarding ways to use your outdoor living space is to gather your family members for a reunion. Perhaps it’s a small group that gets together annually, or a large one whose far-flung members attend every two or five or even 10 years. Whether large or small, a reunion is a wonderful opportunity to knit families closer together through shared stories.

In the much-underrated 1990 film Avalon, a Russian immigrant to 1940s America relates the disintegration of his family ties. In his young manhood, his children gathered at the feet of older relatives during family gatherings and listened to tales of their heritage and history. As television took hold of society in the late ’50s, children and adults alike opted for the entertainment of television personalities, instead of the stories of their roots.

But just as the art of listening to stories has gone by the wayside, so has the art of telling them. Here’s how to re-start a tradition of storytelling at your family reunion.

Advise all who will be attending that there will be an opportunity to tell some stories about the family, and let them know you’d love to hear them share something. Especially encourage older ones to think about their children when they were young, their own childhood, or even stories they may remember from their parents. With only a little effort, you can be hearing about things that happened over a century ago.

Have some questions prepared to start the ball rolling. “Where did your family go on vacation when your children were small?” “How did you and Grandpa meet?” “What’s the funniest thing one of your children ever did?” “How did you manage through tough times?”

Encourage storytellers to use descriptions that will engage all of the senses. Was the thunder rolling in the distance just before the downpour when Grandma and Grandpa bumped into each other running for cover? Did the scent of the lilacs in Aunt Ellen’s garden waft in through her kitchen window? Was there a cool breeze on the beach near the family vacation campsite? Did the sun sparkle off the snow on the mid-winter drive to Uncle Max’s? Was the strawberry jam your mom made the sweetest you ever tasted? Use touch, smell and taste as well as sight and sound to bring the scene to life for listeners.

The best stories have a point. “That’s when I first learned how important it is to be on time.” “If it hadn’t rained that day, we might never have met, and most of you would never have been born!” It doesn’t have to be profound, but be prepared to help your tellers wrap up their stories with a short statement of its significance.

Get the younger ones involved too — perhaps you can encourage them to be official family historians who will record the stories. If there’s a group, give them papers and drawing materials and ask them to make pictures of the scenes they will hear unfold. You can have the older ones label the drawings and then gather them together with ribbon. Each family can take home their personal family album.

If there are old photographs that support an account, or a time period, mount these in archive quality materials and display them in a shady spot or pass them around while the story is being told. Use other mementos as well. Your great-grandfather’s railroad watch that he wore to work every day for 45 years, or a playbill from your first date will help bring life to the accounts of those special times. So gather your loved ones on your porch or patio and make some memories while you start a storytelling tradition

About The Author
Debbie Rodgers, the haven maven, owns and operates Paradise Porch, and is dedicated to helping people create outdoor living spaces that nurture and enrich them. Her latest how-to guide “Attracting Butterflies to Your Home and Garden” is now available on her web site. Visit her at www.paradiseporch.com and get a free report on “Eight easy ways to create privacy in your outdoor space”.