Got a video camera or audio tape recorder?

Grab it and go find your mother, father, grandparents, uncles and aunts and cousins and start asking them about their family history.

Record yjem. Edit it if you wish, and then share it, or file it away to be shared in the future. Do it again years later if they’re still around. Collect your families oral histories while you have a chance to do so. It’s worth it.

It may not be easy. You may find it easier to have someone else do the interviewing if the stories don’t just flow. Sometimes it’s easier for a stranger to get people talking, and telling the stories they think they’ve already told family before.

Be prepared to have to be persistent and ask the same question 3 different ways to get more than “my father never talked about much”. Maybe prepare a small script. be sure to ask about each parent, and about their parents, and if they knew anyone else in the extended family, and what they knew about them.

Ask people about themselves, their childhood, their ambitions, their treasured memories and regrets. Most people like to talk about themselves and wont’ stop once you get them started.

In the not too distant past oral history, and perhaps family bibles, were the main way that information passed from generation to generation.

gets embellished and distorted, but asking about the past now may be your only chance to ever find out more about the people just a few generations away from you.And those stories may be more interesting than anything you’ll ever fnid in books, newspapers and records of much older generations.

We tend to take people’s presence in our lives for granted, not wanting to acknowledge that someday they may be gone. And I suspect that most people doing genealogy research tend to overlook the rich oral history carried around by the people in the family tree that are still around.

I’d have a hard time pointing a camera at my dad and I know he’d react differently if I did. I’ve heard most of his stories before, I think, since he tends to repeat them so much over the years. But I’d still like to have them forever, told the way he tells them.

You may not appreciate the value in this now, or ever come to feel a need to watch it again. But someone else you’re related to may find this to be a priceless snapshot of history.

I’m lucky to have 16mm black and white silent films of both my parents in the 1930’s. Apparently camera rentals weren’t uncommon then. The viewfinder was skewed and the adults in one are headless. But having my mother doing Shirley Temple inspired moves and disappearing via a camera magic trick are priceless, as is seeing my father and his brothers at a rural swimming hole.

I feel very lucky to have recordings of my grandfather playing piano, even if he was in his 80’s and arthritic, and even though the recording is on a horrible sounding old cassette. It takes me back to listening to him play piano as a child, and the appreciation of music that this helped spark in my.

I’m lucky that about 23 years ago I took a cassette deck to my great aunt’s house and recorded her talking about family history. She was almost 90 and had a tendency to repeat herself, and it’s likely that some of what she said is wrong. Her brother was my grandfather, and he died about 20 yeas before I was born.

At one point she said she didn’t have a brother. But she went on to tell stories about him. And about her life running a school in the Appalachian mountains during the depression. She told a story about my grandmother, who I also never knew, and when I played that for my father over 20 years later it brought tears to his eyes with a revelation about that day that his brother had never told him.

I should put a clip of Aunt Margaret up here. She was a great oral historian, with a mother who had been around about when the DAR was founded and helped run the local chapter.

About 6 years ago I was on a road trip and interviewing a friend who had a bizarre and complex life, Harvey Job Matusow. I realized I was about 100 miles from my aunt’s house in Maine and called her to tell her I was going to visit.

Aunt Cam had been getting treatments for cancer and had just come home. We weren’t very close but we shared an interest in genealogy and she was the last remaining elder on my mother’s side of the family.

I could tell she didn’t really want me to come visit. But I knew I wasn’t likely to see her again if I did. It wasn’t that I expected her to die 2 months later. I thought she was healthy after her treatments but later I came to realize that she knew she didn’t have long.I was probably a bit rude in telling her I was coming whether she wanted me to or not.

I drove over 200 miles out of my way to see her. I’d never seen the farm she’d lived on for decades and she gave me a tour, sharing the history of the place, and with it, her love of the plants and trees she’d nurtured there.

I asked her if I could videotape her talking about family history and she didn’t want to. She said “it’s all there, on my computer and in my files.” I argued that it was unlikely her grandchildren would ever read the info we’d collected over 3 generations of genealogy research, and that an oral history of her telling the stories would be a better thing to have.

She agreed, reluctantly. I said I only had an hour of tape. She said she didn’t expect us to take more than 20 minutes.

An hour later I had to stop her when the tape stopped. I got wonderful stories about her childhood in a wooded WPA village in the 1930’s and how that sparked a lifelong love of nature. I got awkward stories about her mother’s prudish attitudes, and much much more. I got tales and memories about at least three generations of family, and these weren’t already on paper.

She died about 2 months later. I took copies of the interview to each of my cousins, most of whom I hadn’t seen for many years, and who I also haven’t had much contact with since then. Some of them were also a bit estranged from their rather eccentric mother and were unlikely to have ever had a conversation with her like the one I recorded.
Cam wanted the memorial service to be a celebration of her life. It was done at a local Quaker meeting house and people freely shared memories, but there were awkward moments and it didn’t all come across as celebratory.

Afterwards we returned to her house, where her children faced the uncomfortable task of divvying up her belongings, books and furniture. She had a wooden trunk that supposedly had come over with the family in the 1700s, portraits from late 1800’s and generations of family memorabilia.

My cousins decided to watch the video. I didn’t really want to join them so I worked on backing up her GEDCOM files in the other room.

Soon there was nonstop laughter roaring from the other room. I didn’t think it was that funny and asked what was up.

It turned out that my mother finally had a chance to get the last word in with her big sister. Mom was correcting her stories, calling her on things and saying stuff like “every time she coughs she’s telling stuff that she made up, it didn’t happen that way.”

Everyone there found the interplay between the two sisters hilarious. It gave a sense of what it was like to be in the room with the two of them and the underlying competition that they’d had since childhood. And that broke the otherwise somber mood of that day, and filled it with laughter. To me, that video became the celebration of her life that she’d wanted us to have, and to us, she was there with us that afternoon.

You can’t plan something like that. It happened because of my impulse or intuition.But you can capture some of the oral history from the living elders in your family tree, no matter how old or young they are, and you may regret it later if you don’t take the time to do it now.