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"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
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:
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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.
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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.
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Provide a list of questions several days or weeks before the interview.
This will also give your interviewee time to remember various stories.
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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), best friends — the list is endless.
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Use the "who, what, where, when, how, and why" strategy when
formulating your questions. "Who was your best friend?", "What was the
most fun you had with your best friend?", "When did you get to see your
best friend?", "How did you and your best friend meet?", "Why was this
person your best friend?"
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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?"
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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?
© 2003 LeAnn R. Ralph
LeAnn R. Ralph is a freelance writer in Wisconsin. She 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). Click here to
read sample chapters and other Rural Route 2 stories — http://ruralroute2.com
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Suggested Links
· Family History Stories - Video
· Center for Life Stories Preservation
· Immigrant Stories and Information
· Heirloom Stories
· Rural Route 2 - Christmas in Dairyland
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Family 
Preserve Your Family History by Writing History Stories