April showers bring May flowers. May flowers bring on travel season. If you’ll be visiting family, put Interviewing on your To Do list.

(Mother’s Day, Graduation Day, Father’s Day, 4th of July, Vacation time. Reunions. You know, family visits.)

This Friday’s GenChat will be devoted to what to do.

Want to do some story catching during a family visit? Join us. Ask questions. Tell about your experiences. Share tips.

(One of my college professors wrote exam questions that began, “Succinctly describe…” That was prep for Twitter. 140 characters at a time.)

I’m practicing my succinctness. Each paragraph here has no more than 140 characters. Plus, all the words are spelled out. SRSLY! (oh. oops.)

It’s all about Q & A, so let’s start:

Q: What time does it start?

A: Friday, April 26, 7pm Pacific, 8pm Mountain, 9pm Central, 10pm Eastern.

Q: If I don’t have a Twitter account, can I still follow along?

A: Yes. Go to this link, and you will see all tweets that include the hashtag #GenChat.

Q: Susan, what’s your Twitter handle?

A: @susankitchens.

Q: If I don’t make it to #GenChat, is there any place I can read the chat transcript?

A: Yes. There will be a Storify collection of everyone’s tweets (I’ve updated this post with a link to it)

Q: Who hosts GenChat?

A: GenChat is a production of In-Depth Genealogy @indepthgen and Conference Keeper @confkeep

Q: I have another question that you didn’t list here.

A: Please ask it in the comments!

(Two notes—One about editing, one about timing.
Editing: These transcribed interviews are lightly edited for clarity and to remove a few spoken-word ums and things like that. There are also places in the interviews where I withhold information at the request of the person interviewed.

Timing: As I was working on this post, I came down with a baaaad case of wintery flu+bronchitis cough-a-palooza and took an unscheduled and unannounced break from posting here at Family Oral History. By the time I emerged from my haze of it all, I saw that Joan Miller’s taking a blogging break to heal from an illness. Get well, Joan.)

A Tale of Two Relatives

Joan Miller: I have two stories. My mother and my mother-in-law. My mother doesn’t want to answer any questions on tape because she might forget. It might not be right. It might be— she’s “forgetting it wrong” is what she says. So she clams up right away. She won’t tell any stories, yet she’ll tell lots of stories when there’s no recorder around. I have to get her past that so I can get the wonderful stories down.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: What have you been doing so far?

Joan Miller: Well, I actually told her about you, and how you use your recorder to record and you started with your grandfather and all that sort of stuff.

All I said was, “Could you tell some stories about when we went Guiding* (when I was 12 and we went to Guide Camps and those kinds of things)? Tell me about that.”

*Guiding—Girl Guides is the Canadian organization that’s equivalent to the American Girl Scouts and Scouting.

She’d just start, and she said, “You’re not recording this, are you?” Then she just stopped.

How do I get her past that?

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: Have you, yet?

Joan Miller: I haven’t. I’ve only got one little story on tape, and that’s it.

I think Mom is worried.  She’s thinking that she’s forgetting too.

(Someone close to Joan’s Mom has issues surrounding memory loss.)

Whereas my Mother-in-law’s attitude, on the other hand, anything that will help the family history, family genealogy, “I’ll tell you all the stories.” She remembers very well, and she has told me stories, and I’ve got things down. That’s a completely different experience.

So those are the two different aspects of coming from the two different mothers.

Joan Miller and I talk some more about her mother’s reticence to be recorded.

Joan Miller: What I do do is I blog our family stories, and I’ll say, “Mom, how do you remember that? Because you know, I was too little and I have my version of it, and I asked my sister…” and so on.

She’ll say, “Let me think about it.”

I’ll phone her later and say, “Do you remember that story about what we were talking about, the cream separator?” (Because we grew up on a ranch, you know, separating milk). And then she’ll start telling me the story,  and I remember there was a million discs to wash—the separator has all these discs.”

She says, “Yeah, there were quite a few of them,” and then she’d go into more detail and she’d start telling me the story and I could put it on the blog [her Cream Separator blog post], as long as I don’t have a recording of her saying that.

(We puzzle through possible reasons why Joan’s mother is afraid to be recorded.)

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: It’s the voice and it’s the immediacy. I’ve long since gotten over—or at least I’ve gotten comfortable with— what I sound like in conversation with all my sentences begun that are not finished and my particular wacky habits of speech. It is what it is.

Joan Miller: You are who you are and that’s how you sound. I think she might be worried that it’s going to be put out there on the internet or something, because I have a blog. I tell her, “This is just for our family history, just for my records, so we don’t lose the story.” And I think that might be another thing, too.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: Do you have any vocal recordings of anybody in your common family—your ancestry—who have died?

Joan Miller: We have a videotape of my grandmother.

FOHUDT: That’s her mother?

JM: Mm hm, yep. Her mother.

FOHUDT: What is her response to that?

JM: Well, she thinks it’s really cool. [laughs] Yeah.

FOHUDT: “Yes, Mom.. and—?” (said with deliberate connect-the-dots tone of voice: It’s cool to have a recording of her voice, but not cool to record yours?)

Joan Miller: So that’s the challenge. Whereas my mother-in-law is very open to whatever.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: So you’ve a challenge, you got one that’s very open.

Did you have any experience of interviewing your mother-in-law where your reaction was like, Omigod, this worked really well, or I was surprised by this, or something that stands out as an interview experience you want to tell me about?

Joan Miller: Well, my mother-in-law is one of these natural storytellers. Because we were doing these interviews talking about her childhood or whatever, she and I are doing a book. We are going to do a book called The Aumack Resort—no, “Or So The Story Goes”—that’s the title. We’ve decided. Because she’s always saying that, “...Or so the story goes.” [laughter]

She grew up in a rural area in Saskatchewan, on this little lake. Her parents came from Michigan to homestead in Saskatchewan, and they started up a resort on the lake. They built these cabins and had these little rowboats, and had a human-sized checker set, and they had mini golf—this was back in the 30s before mini golf was everywhere. And she was telling me the story about growing up there. 

I said, “You’ve got all these pictures, you’ve got all these stories, we gotta get this down.” So I wrote up a draft. I said, “We’re writing a book.”

She’s all, “This is a great idea.”

And because she’s been putting an album together of all these loose pictures, or whatever, I said, “We’re going to digitize them. And we’re going to put the stories down and here’s the draft.” When she was going to Saskatchewan, I said, “Take this draft with you—I made up a whole bunch of copies. Give it to all the relatives around there and see if we can get more pictures, more stories to include.”

She said, “I’ve always wanted to publish the recipes that they have from the resort.”

I said, “We can put those in the book.”

So that’s what came out of that interview.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools:  Wow. It’s a book and it’s becomes a history of that place.

Joan Miller: Yeah. It’ll be not just our family who’s interested in it. It’ll be all these people that came to the resort, and their families. She even remembers some of the names of the people that used to come—the doctor that used to rent the cabin over there, you know, all that kind of stuff. I thought that was amazing.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: Yeah. That is excellent. That is totally excellent.

Joan Miller: I said, “It doesn’t have to be perfect, we’ll do it in a digital format. We can change it, update it, whatever.” We’ll put it on Lulu.com or something. Or Amazon.  Probably Lulu.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: That sounds great!

Equipment

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: What was it like working with the equipment? Did you have any hiccups, learning curves, anything?

Joan Miller: Well, one time I thought I would push record, and didn’t. You know, a stupid thing. Um, but it’s been pretty good. And this little recorder, it has to be fairly close, you know, sort of between the two people.

FOHUDT: And it’s small enough—where it—

Joan Miller: Yeah, it’s not intrusive.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: Neither is this [the livescribe pen I used for this interview].

JM: I like that.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: Yeah, this is where the sound is coming in, the sound is being recorded in the headphones there.

Joan Miller: I saw one of those advertised in the Skymall magazine on the airplane—but not as good as that one.

FOHUDT: This—is actually a few years old. Livescribe has come out with some newer models.

Joan Miller: What kind is that?

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: It’s a Livescribe pulse pen. It’s the old 2 gigabyte Pulse Smartpen—I got it when the 2 gig version was the top of the line (back in 2008). They’ve got pens with more storage space—4 GB Echo Smartpen and 8 gigabyte Echo Smartpen. And an entire revamped model. When you use it, it comes across to others as “oh I’m just taking notes.”
(Links to pens are affiliate links.)

On Disclosure and Permission

Joan Miller: What about the issue of recording people without them knowing?

FOHUDT: How do I feel about that? [Sigh.] I don’t like that.

JM: I don’t like that, either.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: I’ve been hanging around enough with oral historians where there is an ethical standard for this. You ask permission. I did have an interview earlier today with somebody who didn’t let the person know first that they were recording, but then said afterwards,

“Because these are important stories to me,  I recorded it.”

“Oh, Okay.”—that was the response. So there was disclosure later, after the fact.

Joan Miller: It was kind of like they tricked them, though.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools:  And so, um, and yet there is that fear of the equipment. I mean, it may be that you say to your Mom, “Look, look, go ahead and do this. And you know, it’s digital whatever, I can delete it right afterwards if you feel like after the end of this—”

Joan Miller: That’s a good idea.

“That it didn’t work. I can delete it.”

FOHUDT:  And so you give her an out, and you give her an experience—“How was it?” “It wasn’t so bad.” Or: “Sure, you told me, and you went and corrected yourself. If you’re listening to that one sentence, maybe it doesn’t make sense, but in the course of the whole recording you clarified it.”

JM: That’s a good idea—give her that sense…  “Let’s listen to it…”

FOHUDT:  Let’s listen to it.

JM: She might be self-conscious about hearing herself or something like that.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools:  She doesn’t have to listen to it. But it’s more like “Let’s have this conversation, and tentatively we’ll record it, and at the end of it, you tell me how you feel, and if you want me to erase it, I will.” And you just hope it wasn’t as bad as she feared.

An upcoming celebration: Hopes and Plans

Joan Miller: We’re going to spend a week with her in July—a long weekend. We’re celebrating her 80th birthday. We rented a place at the lake. So there’s going to be family all around. There’s going to be stories. I’m printing out this huge family tree banner. Lots of cousins coming and stuff. And I’m thinking the stories will come out.  After the main weekend, a bunch of people will leave. And then there’ll be the core of us for a week. So, maybe then I’ll tape them all.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools:  Maybe depending who’s there, or whatever, if you have somebody get up and say, “I’m going to tell you a story,” where you hear someone else talking—and you know we’re just telling stories.

Joan Miller: It will be around the campfire. We can do that. My sister has a phenomenal memory for trivia. She remembers the little things that we were doing when we were kids. And so she is a good prompter for that kind of stuff. What did we do then? How did we do that? or whatever. I’m thinking that’d be a good time.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools:  Please keep me informed what happens with your Mom. Because that—I mean, I come from extroverts and exhibitionist kind of people—where it’s like, “Oh yeah, sure, you want me to do this? Yeah!” you know, it’s like the first time I came here to Jamboree I had a little booth here and my Mom shows up and I did an interview demo, you know, I’ll show you how it’s done, blah blah blah—she rises to the occasion, she’s a docent. So, when it comes to a situation like yours, I don’t have that experience of that reticence. And yet, people might want to know, “well, you do all this interview stuff, so what do I do if—?” “Well, I’ll tell you what some other people have done”—and that’s why I’m collecting these.

How to help a friend

Joan Miller: And then another story is my friend—I think I told you about my friend who’s got lung cancer. I sort of broached it once about collecting her stories because she’s terminal and she was not really receptive. But that was a few months ago. So I’m going to try again. Right now she’s going off to China—she’s Chinese—for some more treatment I guess. And she’s doing Chi Gong. I’ve even taking her to Chi Gong. I want to record her growing up in China, those kind of stories. Because when she’s gone ... they’re going to love having that.

FOHUDT: Does she have children?

Joan Miller: She does.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools:  There was something I heard about. And it may be difficult, but, to say, “I just want to get a recording of your voice reading a story to your kids that you read to them. So that they can have this—so this is something that they can have the sound of.” Because it’s a start, an easy way in. And this is what I heard about among some—in the Association of Personal Historians. Sometimes these things where you’re dealing with hospice care kidna stuff or terminal end of life. It’s not the big huge story of your life. It’s like the person thinks, “Oh yeah, I could do that.”

Joan Miller: That’s a good idea.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools:  Yeah, read a story to your kids. Can’t remember where it was that I saw that. (Note: Here is the original article, which came to my attention via an email on the Association of Personal Historians mailing list)

The first thing you do is say, here’s a story, here’s a recording, just have this recording for your kids. And if that gets her in this reflective mood where something happens afterwards, where she says, “well, you know, because I want to make sure that my boys know—it’s boys, sons right? I want to make sure that my boys know blah blah blah blah blah. and the recorder’s going.

Joan Miller: Especially when she’s going to be coming back from China, and we’ll get together with you when she’s back and then so all these things in China will remind her of so many things that she can tell me. So. Yes.

It’s an awful disease, lung cancer. It sends out little tumors everywhere in the body.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools:  Well, good for you for doing your part on one front.

Joan Miller: Any other questions?

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools:  Well, one of the questions that I was thinking of asking and I don’t know if you’ve already answered this—like has there been any sort of like disaster fiasco or something like that or just you know just you know, ooops.

Joan Miller: Nope, I haven’t got that much experience with it yet. It will happen, I’m sure, other than that one time where I didn’t record. But I caught it later.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools:  Okay, I think that’s it. But again, keep me informed what goes on with your mother.

Joan Miller: Especially with this 80th birthday…

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools:  Probably you will get stories from other people there.

Joan Miller: What I might do is like if we’re sitting around the campfire with my brother and my sister and everybody’s talking about growing up and whatever, and I could tell them I’m recording. I could tell everybody that I’m recording. But get them to lead the story, so Mom doesn’t have to speak all the time, she can just interject with her thoughts. “I remember this way” or whatever.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools:  You get the social interactions where, in a situation like that, the recorder is going to really be diminished in power in her eyes.

Joan Miller: Yeah. And everybody has a different perspective on the events. That could be a very valuable recording just itself to get my brother and sister to talk….

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools:  yeah. My boyfriend—I sat down with his Mom and did a short recording, maybe 40 minutes. And um she later had increasingly—her dementia got worse and worse, and she died. And then I was helping my boyfriend write a eulogy for her memorial. And I said, You want to listen to this recording? And he was like, you know we fortified with wine ahead of time, like what’s this going to be like. He goes, “Susan, I’m so glad you did this.” So having that kind of experience myself with my grandpa, and this experience in with my boyfriend and his mom, um,—”

Joan Miller: It’s important

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools:  I hope you can do that.

Joan Miller: One regret that I had is that I never got my father on any kind of recording or whatever.

On her blog, Joan Miller describes that discusses the results of this and other conversations as she describes the family gathering for her mother’s 80th birthday. The outcome was successful!

We were celebrating Mom’s 80th birthday at the lake. I was emcee and one of the games we played was the “Memories Game”.  This game came to me in the one of the middle of the night brain waves.  It was a true experiment because I wanted to use the recorder, something I hadn’t done in a large group setting before.  I primed most of the family members in attendance ahead of time so they could think about their memories and be prepared.

How it worked

We went around the group one by one and I asked everyone to give a memory they had of the birthday girl, perhaps from her childhood or as a Mom, Grandma, aunt or sister. I also asked if people were okay with passing a recorder around while we were doing this. We were to pretend the recorder was a microphone; the individual was to give us their memory then hand the recorder to the next person. Whom ever had the recorder had the floor.

The Memories Game was wildly successful. [Read the entire post]

She also picked up a Livescribe pen and described what it was like to work with it, in her second post about the 80th birthday party.

Joan and I didn’t just talk about her family interview circumstances. We also had some fitness fun at Jamboree. She’s more athletic than I am, but since I was just starting a fitness program in which I was doing planks, she joined me. Her form is better.

Photo credits:
Girl Guides magazine. Creative Commons photo by Ron Hollins
Fireworks at Meeting Lake, Saskachewan: Creative Commons photo by Jeff/Space Ritual.
Planking at Jamboree: Photo by Cheryl Palmer of Heritage Happens
Other photos courtesy Joan Miller, Luxegen

This post is part of the Interviewing Family series

I talk to genealogists at So Cal Genealogical Society Jamboree about their experiences interviewing family. Other posts in this series:

• Introduction: How does genealogical research differ from interviewing family?
• Interviewing Family: Kim von Aspern-Parker, Part 1
• Interviewing Family: Kim von Aspern-Parker, Part 2

I started with Beth Lamie’s idea, Draw From A Hat. Put a set of questions in a hat and draw one out and ask. Repeat. That was the inspiration: That, and “Get the kids involved.”

But of course, somebody has to think up the questions that get placed into the hat. I focused on this with my nieces—two girls, aged 9 (nearly 10) and 4. Let them be the ones to come up with questions for everyone.

What we did to prepare for Dinner Conversation

I arrived at their house, got them to step away from the computer and the Tee vee (sigh. yes. true.) with an aunt-ish scheme: Think of some questions to ask people at the dinner table. Instead of generic questions that would apply to anybody, I decided to get as specific as possible. What question do you want to ask your Dad? Your Mom? Grandma? Uncle J? Uncle T? Aunt Susan?

Aunt Susan: Okay, girls, after dinner, let’s ask everyone questions about themselves and record the answers. Okay? Okay. So the first thing we do is think of questions to ask people. Can you think of questions to ask people?

Nearly 10: What kind of questions?

Aunt Susan: Well, there’s one question I’d like to ask your Mama (who is from Panama). And that is, What was her first Thanksgiving like? You’ve been having Thanksgivings all your life. It’s an American tradition. But your Mama didn’t grow up in America. So she probably remembers her first one because she had it as an adult.

Nearly 10: (eyes wide) Ooh!
(some dawning comprehension lit upon her face.)

Aunt Susan: So what questions would you like to ask?

Nearly 10: Oh, I could ask Dad about what inspired him to be a surfer!

Aunt Susan: Exactly! Good question. Let’s write it down. You want to write it, or shall I?

She did. Once she thought of a new question, Nearly 10 wrote it down in her notebook. Nearly 10 wrote them down.

Younger Sister (age 4), also came up with a couple of questions.

Younger Sister: I want to know what Mommy’s favorite plant is! (Their mother loves gardening)

I had a slight challenge right there.

Aunt Susan: Is there another way to ask that question about plants? “What is your favorite plant” will get a very short answer—the name of one plant. How about thinking of a question that’ll get a longer answer?

With a little coaching, she settled on: “How did you become a gardener?”

We went through the same process with her other question—“Did you play hide-and-go-seek?” (A question that asks for a YES or NO answer) became “What games did you play when you were a kid?”

Alternatively, I might have kept the original question and had them ask a follow-up question.

• What is your favorite plant? What do you like about it? 
• Did you play hide and go seek? Tell me a story about one time you played hide and go seek.

I pulled out a bunch of 3 x 5 cards. Nearly 10 wrote 1 question per card.

Some examples:

• What was your first experience sailing?
• What was it like when you first started surfing?
• Why did you want to become an air force pilot?
• What was your first project for Space?
• What was it like when your first baby was born?
• How did you become a gardener?
• What was it like when you went to High School?

Once the questions were ready, it was time to get the equipment in place.

Recorder (with a built-in microphone): check!

Enough free space on the memory card: check! 
(a 4 gb card, I made sure that there was at least 2 gigabytes of free space. That would give us plenty—more than 3 hours recording time).

Headphones to monitor the recording quality: check!

New batteries for recorder: check!

Backup power, (first, the power adapter that plugs into an outlet and an extension cord to bring power right to where the recorder was located): check!

And… The stack of cards with the questions.

Everything was ready and in place.

How it worked in practice

Thanksgiving conversation has distinct phases. The chatter of anticipation and “Go wash your hands, it’s ready, it’s ready” gave way to the round-robin “what I’m thankful for,” the blessing, the chit chat of taking of plates to the food line and the piling high thereof, the compliments uttered between initial bites, the shushed concentration of eating, the going back for seconds, and then finally, relaxed conversation.

Not too long into the relaxed conversation phase, I introduced our next activity. “Nearly 10 is going to ask you all questions and we’re going to record it.”

I powered up the recorder, and spoke an introduction. “It’s Thanksgiving 2010 and the Kitchens family is gathered here in Henderson, Nevada. Nearly 10 has some questions she’s going to ask and we’re recording what people say.”

Nearly 10 got her deck of cards with questions. She shuffled the cards. I said, for the benefit of those who could not see her,  “She’s shuffling the cards.”

She said, “It can’t be right without the shuffle.” The she chose one and said, “Grandma, tell about a time—one of your first times sailing a boat.”

That launched Grandma (my Mom) into a story that went well into five minutes. We grownups were amused by what she said; it was our childhood she was talking about. She painted a vivid picture of some heavy seas, and some cantaloupe getting loose and being tossed around in the slop, and of one that broke, with cantaloupe seeds all over the cabin of the boat. Nearly 10, who was primed to ask her next question, twitched with frustration. She sighed and rolled her eyes.

She spent all that time thinking up questions, and didn’t anticipate how long it would take to answer them. I hadn’t anticipated that I’d need to tell her to expect to wait a long time in between asking questions. Oops.

I told her, “The point of these questions is to get people telling the stories that they otherwise wouldn’t tell. It’s okay.”

The session continued for an hour. She asked some more questions (including Younger Sister’s question about gardening). When appropriate, I moved the position of the recorder so it would sit near the person talking. (I did that before they began talking, so any microphone-handling noise would not mask actual storytelling.)

The recorder picked up multiple simultaneous conversations around the table. This was not your sit down one-on-one type of recorded interview. The recording contains side conversations (some whispered, some out loud), background noise of table clearing and questions about the pot of whatever on the back burner with the flame on, interruptions, follow-up questions, and more. It’s a thing of beauty. An hour’s worth of question and answer, where each person had a chance to tell one story, and each of us heard and learned new things about people we’ve known for all our lives.

There was one guest to this gathering who was not a family member, per se. considered family. She was asked a question, and she answered, but that exchange was not recorded. We had the hear something about you in the moment, but it didn’t become part of the record.

Observations about this approach

• Everyone is more open to participating because the activity is child-centered.
• It took us out of our standard routine of things-we-talk-about-at-Thanksgiving.
• Though the adult siblings have known one another all our lives, each of us heard something new about the other person.
• Everyone gets involved in the process.
• Kids think up ways to come up with questions.
• Stories are edited to be G rated.
  My first thought in response to the question I was asked (What was it like when you first went to high school?) was not suitable for an under-10 audience. The first thing I thought of concerned an event that involved teenage experimentation with a mild, plant-based consciousness-altering substance. It would have been an interesting story to tell and to hear. But I didn’t want to go there with my nieces. I ended up talking about the second thing I thought of.

Lessons Learned: How I’d prepare differently.

Thinking on last year’s event (and listening to the recording), there are some things I would do differently.

• Setting expectations for children.
  Even though, in the moment, I helped my niece in her moment of impatience, I think the whole thing would have gone a bit better if I helped establish expectations for what this would be like.
  I might’ve said,

  “You know what? You’ve thought up a bunch of really good questions to ask people. That’s excellent. But there’s more to this than pulling a card out and asking someone a question, getting a short answer and then asking the next one. The whole point is to get other people to talk and to tell stories. After you ask a question, the other person is going to talk. Maybe even for what seems like a long time. If someone talks for a long time telling a story, that’s how you know that you’ve thought up a good question.”

• I would create a list with everyone’s name on it that the “interviewer” can mark off and track who has been asked a question and who has not. If, say, the child’s parent gets asked three questions before a question is asked of someone else, this helps ensure that everyone actually does takes turns.

This Week: Thanksgiving Family Interviews 2.0

This week, I’d like to try a repeat of what we did last year. We have opportunities and challenges.

Opportunities

In addition to the usual suspects (Mom, brothers, hosting brother and his wife and children), we will have more people at this year’s gathering:

• Sister in law’s parents who are visiting from Panama
• Nephew A —sister in law’s nephew (Panamanian) and family, visiting from out of state
• Cousin’s family, also visiting from out of state.
• Cousinlings (cousin’s children)—more kids to think up and ask questions

More people around the table means more stories! Different stories from different people.

Those who were there from last year will have a sense of how this goes (oh yeah, I remember that from last year—We take turns answering questions).

This is a good way to introduce the Panamanian grandparents to sharing their stories through oral history. I don’t think they’ve been interviewed before. I do recall recording individual stories by friends and family members for Nephew A’s wedding, but his grandparents weren’t in the States for it.

Challenges

• With more people around the table, it will make for a really long table. We might have a separate table for kids. Or it may be hard for someone way at one end to hear what the person at the other end of the table is saying.
• Bilingual stories in a group setting.
  Obviously, it’s easier to tell a story in your own mother tongue. There will be stretches of time where people will not understand what the speaker is saying.

The kids that will help gather questions are older—three of the four are in the 9-12 year-old range.

Here, I brainstorm ways to involve them:

• To the kids: Think up your own questions to ask.
• Kids, go to the others and ask them to think of questions to ask someone else.
• Now go through all the questions, and divide them into two types:
  1. A question for a specific person
     (such as, Dad, tell about when you first started surfing, Mom how did you become a gardener)
  2. A question you can ask anyone
     What was it like when you first went to high school? What was it like when your first baby was born?

  For the “ask anyone” kind, draw names of all the people present to make it random. (Oh wait, maybe this is too complicated. But hey, it can be crazy fun complicated, too)

What about you? Do you have any plans for gathering stories from family members at Thanksgiving or for the National Day of Listening?

UPDATE: Monday, 28 November, 2011. A great time was had by all. Arrived to learn that Nephew A did not, in fact, come for Thanksgiving. Other arrivals (Thursday was a travel day for two households) made it difficult to plan the interview with the kids. Back up plan: Let’s do this Friday. But oh, the numbers of people and the plans already in place and diverse directions they all went in made it too difficult to pull this together.

I had an incredibly marvelous time with family. Amazing. (Saturday morning at a frightfully early hour, we all gathered around the TV to watch the launch of Mars Curiosity Rover—my boyfriend worked on the landing radar system for the Mars Science Lab!) But recording interviews was not a part of the picture this year.

That’s a lesson in itself. Many people going in many directions makes it more difficult to do group activities. Come to think of it, last year’s gathering was “small” by our standards. 8 people. This year: 12 (plus: double the number of kids)

Kim von Aspern-Parker blogs at Le Maison Duchamp. Highlights of Part 1: For Dad to start talking, he had to be in an altered state. Using a genealogy chart to interview? Surprise! Advice for interviewing: remember to listen for the stories, don’t interrupt people, and work from photo albums.

Disclosure and Permissions

In the first half, while Kim talked about her visit with her 90-year old aunt and the misunderstanding over the genealogy chart, she described putting her recorder out on the table with a bunch of other items (keys, phone, etc.), and interviewing her aunt, and letting her know after the fact. We revisit a bit of that conversation for this later section on disclosure and permissions.

Kim von Aspern-Parker: I said, “You know, all these stories you’re telling me. They’re all about our family, It’s not so much that they’re dead people but they’re our family.” And I said, “And I didn’t grow up in this family, so I don’t know these stories. So I’ve been taping them so I can have them.”

She said, “Oh, okay.”

She was okay with that.

A little later on, I mentioned a video I created. Which brought up the topic again: 

Kim von Aspern-Parker: If you’re going to videotape [the interview], I think, too—or even tape record it it’s okay if they know it [beforehand], usually it’s better if you tell them afterwards. Because they tend to get uptight that they’re on camera or that they’re being taped.

If they say, “Oh, no no no I don’t want that taped,”

you can say, “Okay, nobody’s going to hear it but me, Mom.”

Or “It’s not okay for ME to have it? Really? You know how my memory is, Mom. Really? You want me not to have that?”

You can always erase it if they really are uncomfortable. Assure them of that.

FOHUDT: Have you—?

KvAP: I’ve never had anybody ask me to erase it.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: In your case, you’ve told them after the fact, and my family’s “I’m cool with doing this” when I ask beforehand. But I’m interested in the varieties of experience. Because I’m a member of the Oral History Association, where the whole idea of taping surreptitiously is a total “No no” ...for me…

[Here, Kim went in another direction, but I wish to finish my thought. I think that if you’re going to record an interview, you get permission ahead of time. This series is about finding out what it’s really like for people to interview family members. I’m collecting real-world information on what people tell their family members about the recording. I’ll revisit this issue at the conclusion of the series.]

Kim von Aspern-Parker: If it’s your family members and I fully say don’t record it and not let them know. They absolutely deserve to know that you’ve taped it.

I’ve only done that to my family members who, if I pull the recorder out, will say, “What are you doing? Put that away.”

I’ll record it. [Afterwards,] I’ll say, “Now, I recorded that. Is it okay? Cause you know, I just wanted the stories. I forget the stories.”

And they say, “yeah, okay, that’s fine.”

I found, too, that if you set up the video camera, if you’re interviewing somebody who’s not your family member, let’s say, because when I was interviewing for school, I used to have to interview people that were not family members, and of course you have to disclose right off the front: “I’m going to record this.”

If you set up the video camera and get it ready and then you just chit chat and talk and get things rolling, they forget that the camera’s there. You have to get them comfortable, first. Otherwise they tighten up and it’s like, “Did I say that right?” They’re worried about correctness and not stuttering and not saying “um” and not saying “you know” and all those things that you see in yourself when you’re practicing a speech or something.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: I don’t have experience videotaping people during an interview. I do all mine audio. And something like this (Livescribe pen, what I used to record this interview) is pretty unobtrusive.

Do you have any family interview disaster stories? Like Omigod it was a fiasco, or something close to a fiasco?

The Hardest Interview

Kim von Aspern-Parker: The hardest interviews I’m still working on right now. I haven’t done very much of them. I started breaking ice.

It’s my aunt Filo, and she’s deaf and she’s 92. Her memory’s not all it used to be. And most of her life people have done things around her thinking she didn’t get it, because she’s deaf. So she’s always been a kind of the fly on the wall; people thought she didn’t know what was going on, brcause she’s deaf. But of course she reads lips perfectly. She’s not stupid. And a long time ago, people equated deafness with a mental illness, you know, they thought you were “touched.”

She’s got great stories. But I’m still getting her warmed up to the fact. I speak some sign language, and so I’m practicing my sign language so I can get it better so I can get it better and she’ll be more comfortable with me. I try to go see her at least a couple of times a year.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: How far of a distance is that?

Kim von Aspern-Parker: She’s in Louisiana, and I’m in California. So it’s not like I can talk to her on the phone. I can’t Skype her. So it’s a hard interview.

As far as a fiasco, it hasn’t crashed and burned yet. But it’s a hard interview because she’s deaf so everything’s in sign language. And she’ll talk, I had the photo album thing out and we were doing the photo album thing, and I said, “who are these people?” And she says, “That’s Dickie. That’s my brother. He’s dead.” I said, who’s this? “Oh, that’s my sister Audrey, that’s your Mama. She dead, too.” Because she’s 92, she’s outlived all of them. And so she can speak, for the most part, she signs some of it, but she speaks for the most part.

Because of her stilted speech, because she can’t hear—she lost her hearing when she was nine. So you’ve got this kind of stilted speech. She’s got great stories.

She was telling me stories about when she lost her hearing—she was really really sick—and supposedly it was an influenza epidemic. But my aunt- a different aunt—thinks it might’ve been a spinal meningitis thing that went around. My great grandmother died, And several people in the neighborhood died, and my aunt Filo lost her hearing. So when Aunt Filo woke up she wasn’t dead, but a lot of other people were. So she had been unconscious for a week, and when she woke up all these people were dead that she knew. And she was 9. And then because she was deaf, they basically sent her away to go to a school for the deaf. And so then she was ostracized from her family. So it was a very hard experience growing. And then her family started treating her like she was “touched”—she wasn’t all there. Mommy coddled her and Daddy felt she was defective, somehow. She’s going to have great stories to tell.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: yeah. But how to do that. Now is that one where because of sign language or whatever, you’ll say, videotape it because you may have more fluent sign and I’d like to get help with interpreting it, or looking it.

Kim von Aspern-Parker: Yeah, I probably will videotape it. I’m still in the ice-breaking stage. I’m doing just a recording of her. Because she does speak. Plus, I wanted to have her voice. She is 92, and should she pass away, I want to have that. This next trip is going to be videotaped. Because they’re getting up there in age.

More advice: Don’t put it off, Take a class

And that’s probably my next bit of advice: Don’t put it off. If you have relatives that are anywhere over the age of 50, start interviewing them, because that’s when heart attacks happen. That’s when their dementia sets in, and things like that. Anytime after 50 and it starts going downhill. [laughter] I know.

FOHUDT: Scary.

KvAP: I’m 53

FOHUDT: I just had my 52nd birthday. Right.

KvAP: It’s starting to go down. Get my stories now.

FOHUDT: cool. Cool. Well [pause] is there any other thing you’d like to say about the experience?

KvAP: Of interviewing?

FOHUDT: yes.

Kim von Aspern-Parker: Well, it doesn’t hurt to go and take some classes on interviewing techniques which I know you can get through journalism schools and in junior colleges/community colleges; oral history programs.

I think that my state archives in California has an oral history program where they’ll teach you how to interview. Because it is a technique. You have to know how to lead the person into telling you their stories. And helping them when they stutter and they kinda go, “well, I don’t know what you’re looking for? What kind of story are you looking for, what do you want me to tell you?”

Once you get them talking, then it’s great. But a lot of people aren’t—I’m a chatterbox; I’ll talk to fence posts (laughs). The cows in the pasture, we have great conversations—

FOHUDT: Moo.

Kim von Aspern-Parker: Yeah (laughs) But as far as some people, they’ll sit there and they’re like, “What do you want me to tell you?” My mother was kind of like that. she was never really a storyteller.

It’s like, “I don’t know what you want me to say? I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”

“Just tell me about when you were a kid. I mean, did you ever remember being sick? Were you ever sick when you were in school?” “not that I can remember.” She makes story dragging it out of her. And those are hard. And again, I think the photo albums help with that. I found that if you find yourself trying to draaaag a story out of somebody:

“Well, did you ever play a practical joke on anybody?”

“Oh, no, I was much too serious for that.”

“Okay. Did you have younger siblings?”

“Yes.”

“How many younger siblings do you have?”

When you have a drag it out story like that, when you’re dragging the information out of a person, I think that a photo album is the best technique that I’ve found.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: In your experience as an interviewer, where you are dragging something out, is there a shift in mental attitude , where you think, “how do I approach this?” ?

KvAP: You start kind of panicking as the interviewer. It’s kind of like, “Oh, this is going to be hard.”

Everybody has a button.

FOHUDT: So you recognize panic?

KvAP: Yeah. oh yeah.

FOHUDT: Do you stay in panic mode, or do you find—what happened with you after panic?

KvAP: Well, my usual first reaction is like, “Oh god, this is going to be hard; she’s not a chatterbox. What’ll I do?” Then I say to myself, “Okay, you have to find their button.” Everybody has a button—something they love to talk about.

With my mother, it was her children. It wasn’t her parents, or her life when she was growing up. She didn’t consider her self important, but her children were everything. My mother was talking about me and my sister. Like, “Why did you put me and Debbie into dancing lessons?” And then she’d talk about that. And that leads into talking about how she’d always wanted to do that as a child, but they lived during the Depression, they didn’t have that kind of money.

“You lived in the depression? Really? What was that like?” and “Where did you live during the depression?”

“I was in Texas.”

“Well, what was that like in Texas?” ... You see pictures of the dust bowl. So then if you can relate it to history, and say, “I’ve seen pictures of the dust bowl, was it like that in Texas?” And then she might start talking about that. “No.”

“Did you have a car?”

“Yeah, we had a car.“And then she might start talking about that.

And so you find the button—which was, for my mother, talking about her children—and then you turn it, you twist it to where you want the interview to go. Obviously, I didn’t want her to talk about me. I know about me. But I wanted it to twist around to her childhood.

“Okay, so you never got to take dance lessons, did you take baton lessons? Did you take ice skating lessons? Did you do anything fun like that? Did you belong to any groups?” ...and then you can get her talking.

“You had me in Girl Scouts, Did you do Girl Scouts, is that why you had me in Girl Scouts?”

“No, we had this other group, we did this church group thing…” and then she might start talking about that.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: So tell me about your church, what else about it? Right. It’s finding the way in—

Kim von Aspern-Parker: Yeah, finding the door in.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: Finding the way in.

All of Kim von Apsern-Parker’s advice

Here, in one place, is Kim’s advice for people doing interviews.

• Don’t ask yes or no questions. Ask questions that will bring out a story.
• Listen. Stories happen in the weirdest times. Pay attention. Take advantage of a story opening and ask a follow-up quesiton if it sounds like the person has mentioned something that might lead to a story.
• Don’t interrupt them. Don’t be so focused on the one data point you’re after that you miss the story they are telling you.
• Use photo albums to get people talking.
• Don’t put it off. Start interviewing any family member over the age of 50.
• Take a class on interview technique to draw stories out of someone. Journalism classes or oral history workshops are two good places to learn interview techniques.
• Find the topic that the person loves to talk about—and use that to drive the interview in the direction you want to go. (Mom loves to talk about her children, so jump from what you did as a mother to your kids to what you experienced as a child growing up).

Jamboree Geneabloggers on Interviewing
Introduction
Kim von Aspern-Parker, Part 1

This interview transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and to remove, you know, a few, like, forms of spoken word that don’t, um, work as well as the written word. There are also places in the interviews where I withhold information at the request of the person interviewed.

Kim von Aspern-Parker: When I started interviewing my dad, I started asking him questions about his family, cause I was doing my genealogy. The first indication that I got from my dad that he was going to be a hard interview:

“What was your grandfather’s name?”

He says, “Mr. Gilchrist.”

“No, like first name, Dad.”

“Grandpa.”

(Probably not.)

So, every time I interviewed my dad it was like draaaaagging information out of him, except this one time - he was having congestive heart failure—so he was on oxygen, and his oxygen saturation got low. Well, when your oxygen saturation gets low, you got loopy—it’s like you’ve been drinking.

And so my dad was wandering around the house singing, “All the girls are wild simply wild over me.”

And he sat down and he goes, “Did I ever tell you I was a Deejay?”

And I went “No!”

And he says “Yep, during World War 2. Worked at the NCO Club. I was a deejay.”

He told me this whole story about being a deejay at the NCO club. Dad’s brother-in-law was in a band. Dad would go and change out the records at the NCO clubs—the Non commissioned officer clubs.

At that time the NCO clubs were segregated. So he would be changing out the records not only in the white men’s NCO clubs, but also in the black officers NCO clubs. He would go and give the records from the black NCO clubs to his brother-in-law who was copying the styles. My father’s brother-in-law was name withheld by request , and he was the drummer for a musician who greatly influenced the direction of rock and roll (name withheld by request.)

So that’s one of my family stories.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: Wow. Now, when you sat down with your dad, did you say “Tell me stories.” Did you record it? Did you have a tape recorder, did you—

Kim von Aspern-Parker: I did use prompts every time I talked to him. I used the book To Our Children’s Children. I love the questions in that book. And it would get them talking. Plus, since my degree was in journalism, I have a little bit more background on knowing how to ask questions. So you don’t ask questions that somebody could answer yes or no to, like,

“Do you know who your grandfather is?”

“Yes”

(pause)

“Do you want to share that information?”

So I would ask questions like “What is the best practical joke you ever played?” Or “What practical joke do you remember?” and then my dad would tell me these wonderful stories about how he was in grade school and they stole somebody’s underwear and run it up the flagpole.

Or I would ask him, “who do you remember from your neighborhood?” and he would say, ” Ok, well, let’s see… across the street was Charlie—he lived here” and it led to my father drawing out an entire diagram of his neighborhood. Which is invaluable for me as a genealogist—now you know who lived where when you get that census. And you have stories for each person.

“Oh, Charlie was my best friend. We used to dig up worms together and we used to go down to the lake and fish.”

And so it would lead to stories like that my dad would share with me. Those are invaluable to me. I taped all of them—

FOHUDT: Cassette tapes?

KvAP: Yes, cassette tapes. That was back in the day.

FOHUDT: How long ago was this?

Kim von Aspern-Parker: I started to interview my dad in 1982, I think. It was over a considerable amount of time. He passed away in 2001. So every year or so, I would take a day or two and ask him to tell me stories.

I really am sad that I didn’t tape the stories that were at Christmastime and stuff like that, when we were just sitting down and he’d just start talking, and I didn’t have anything with me that I could pull out [to start recording] and say, “wai—wai—wait, say that again.”

Maybe you shouldn’t bring out a genealogy chart

My aunt in Florida is 90, and I just visited her, and I wanted her to tell me family stories. And every time I would pull out the chart and say, “Okay, so what do you remember about your grandfather Henry Landry?” she’d say, “Ah. They’re all dead people, I don’t want to talk about them. They’re just all dead people.”

So I got in the habit of taking my tape recorder with me. And I had just a little handheld digital—and I’d bring out my phone and my notebook and everything I had—my cup of tea. I just set everything else that I was carrying with me down, and the tape recorder would be on. I wouldn’t tell her anything, I’d just set it all down on the table. And we’d start talking, and I’d say something about—“you remember when you told me the story about Henry, what was that about?—that he had a farm, or he lost the farm, or what?” and she’d go, “Oh!” and she’d start telling me the story.

But if I pulled out the tape recorder and let her know it was on, she would not talk to me.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: Did you ever discuss with her the fact that you had recorded this?

Kim von Aspern-Parker: Oh yeah, she knows.

FOHUDT: She knows. Tell me about that conversation with her. How she come to know that?

Kim von Aspern-Parker: Because later I said, “You know, all these stories you’re telling me. They’re all about our family, It’s not so much that they’re dead people but they’re our family.” And I said, “And I didn’t grow up in this family, so I don’t know these stories. So I’ve been taping them so I can have them.”

She said, “Oh, okay.”

She was okay with that. She just didn’t want to talk about dead people. So anytime I’d pull out the genealogy chart, that was talking about dead people.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: So the chart equals dead people, versus “oh you know that story blah blah blah,” the “by-the-way”...

Kim von Aspern-Parker:  The by-the-way casual conversation about her father or her grandfather or whatever—that was okay.

Or “tell me a story about your husband who was in the air force and he’s passed on.”

Those were okay: she didn’t mind talking family stories. She didn’t care that I was recording it. She just cared that I didn’t pull out that genealogy chart—that meant “dead people” to her.

FOHUDT: Really!

KvAP: Isn’t that funny?

And I need the chart to keep track of who’s who.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: Right. Yeah you kind of have to have your little crib sheet on a small 3 x 5 card. So are those the two people that you’ve interviewed? Have you interviewed other people?

Kim von Aspern-Parker: Mostly, yeah. I have wonderful aunts and uncles that live into their 90s. The problem is some of them love to tell stories. My Aunt Lena loved to tell stories. And she used to put out newsletters every Mondays and she would tell stories about the family. So I have tons of family stories from her that she put out on those Monday messages that she sent to all her friends and family.

FOHUDT: Email?

KvAP: Yeah. She would send them out on email. She sent them out before she died. Now her daughter has a blog and is kinda continuing that. So that’s really fun. We have family stories that come to me from all different places.

Remembering to Listen

I think that the trick is remembering to listen. Not just to know which questions to ask, but remember to listen because the stories happen just in the weirdest times, like people driving somewhere: “Oh, my gosh, that reminds me of the time when—” If you’re just kinda going, Oh, yeah, yeah, okay—you’re not paying attention, and listening, and then expanding on it, saying, “Well, how old were you? What school were you at? Were your friends in on that?” You need to know how to continue the conversation, how to keep it going so that it becomes a whole blown story, and not just a remark.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: And that’s something that especially your journalism background has helped you with. Do you think that you already had a sense of that before you got into journalism?

Kim von Aspern-Parker: I think I had a sense of that. I’m nosy. I’m a nosy person, so I had a sense of that beforehand, that I was always asking questions and saying—

“Why did you do that?” or “How come?”

“Well, because my friend thought it was a good idea.”

“Well, Really? if I did that now you wouldn’t punish me, Mom?”

“Yeah, I probably would.”

“Well what made you think it was a good idea then?”

I’ve always been the question person and drive my family crazy. I have that; I think that journalism honed that a little bit. Somebody could develop it if they were interested in the stories. You have to be interested.

Advice

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools: If you had advice for somebody who was starting out with interviewing someone who thinks, “I’d like to do this,”  what one thing is the biggest takeaway or one of the biggest takeaways? (Or, if more than one thing, boil it down to three best bits of advice)

Kim von Aspern-Parker: Don’t interrupt them.

If somebody starts talking to you about a story, don’t get so focused in on the fact that you’re trying to get Grandma’s birthdates that you don’t listen to the story that they’re telling you.

Because a lot of times you’re interviewing somebody and you ask them the question, “Okay, now where was grandma born?”

And they say, “Oh, you know grandma was born in Wichita Kansas” (or wherever), and they start telling you “you know, she told me this time about a tornado she lived through” and she starts talking about the tornado.

Well, now you’re thinking, “yeah, but I need her birth date, yeah, but I need her birth date . You’re not telling me about her birth date .”

You’re missing the story they are telling you about how grandmother lived through the tornado and lost her house (or whatever the story is). And people will tend to interrupt and say, “Okay, okay, tell me about that later, but right now I need—” and you’ve lost the story. They’ll never come back to it. So if they start on something, let them go on it.

My second best advice is pull out the photo album. The photo albums get people talking.

You can see, and ask:

“Well, who’s this in this picture?”

“That’s your grandpa Henry.”

“Well, who’s he holding?”

“Oh! That was the first baby born that year.”

“Who is it?”

And then it starts the story talking about when that baby came to visit and we had a big family reunion and Aunt Sally was there, and that was the last time anybody saw Aunt Sally, she disappeared after that. And the story goes on and on and on.

It’s a story you wouldn’t have gotten if you hadn’t looked at that picture.

Those are my two best ones.

FOHUDT:  Have you seen…

(at this point I started talking about the posts I’ve done on this site about photo albums)

I’ve done a few blog posts about working with photo albums for working with interviews.

What I saw when I witnessed a family interview take place during a holiday visit (the interview was with photo albums).

I share those interviewing with photo-album-lessons again, with better instructions.

In part 2, I have a YouTube movie where we’re going through my interview of my mom with some of the pages from the album. So you can get a sense of how to do it if you’re going to have a recording so that it works.

In the next post—the second half of Kim von Aspern-Parker’s interview:

• More about getting permission for conducting interviews
• The hardest person to interview (and why)
• Kim’s concluding advice for others who want to interview family

The four people:

• Kim von Aspern-Parker of Le Maison Duchamp
• Joan Miller of Luxegen
• Donna Wendt of Another Day With Donna
• Lisa Alzo of The Accidental Genealogist

(Listed in the order I interviewed them)

But first, imagine the following scenario.

You decide to contact the government agency that can give you some vital records for Great Great Great Grandma, which are stored at the Grove County Records. You want her birth certificate and marriage certificate.

The usual procedure for that is to write a request for the information. Maybe they have a PDF form online that you can fill out and print. Or maybe you just write Great Great Great Grandma’s name and whatever other information you have. Along with the request, you write a check to cover the processing fee and mail your request to the Grove County Records Department.

And then you wait.

One day, an envelope with Grove County Records Department return address appears in your mail.

Excited, you tear it open. You are moments away from looking at Great Great Great Grandma’s birth and marriage certificates.

You pull out the contents. Your request form is there with a big red stamp.

Denied.

There’s a handwritten note scrawled at the bottom. It says, “Grove County Records Department just does not feel like providing you with that information.”

Oh, and of all things, they kept the check.

“No way!” you exclaim. “How can that be?! This is a records department of a government entity; they all more or less follow the same kind of procedure. Providing records to people is one of the things they’re supposed to do. They should do this. And they say they don’t feel like it?!? What is up with that? Are they nuts?”

In this scenario, I’ve deliberately mis-matched a request for historical information and a response.

The request: A genealogical vital records request.

The response: A family member’s refusal to record an interview with you.

Got that? The genealogy request receives a response that might happen in an oral history setting. 

The scenario highlights the difference between research for genealogical records and the act of recording family interviews.

Genealogy is more or less predictable

Genealogy is a practice of record-seeking and record keeping. The hunt for records follows a more-or-less predictable path.

There are different document types, and different locations to find them. For each type of document, though, the method you follow to get your hands on the document is predictable and orderly.

The hunt is for the record. The most common types of records are vital records (births, marriages, deaths), court records, property records, records in newspapers, census records, church or synagogue or mosque records, city directories, military pension records, immigration and travel records, cemetery gravestones. The genealogist is on a hunt for records.

(That’s not to say that genealogy research is unaffected by individual circumstance. Variations in name spelling may turn a straightforward search into a daunting challenge. Or it may be that your ancestor’s Grove County Records Department may have burned up in the horrible Grove Downtown Fire of 1926. But an individual fire that destroyed all the records does not change the general method by which you obtain vital records from most County Records Departments.)

Approaching Family Members for an interview: Your Mileage May Vary

A family interview, where one member asks another member to sit down and tell stories, is filled with unpredictable circumstances. Caprice. A certain personality type with certain inclinations. Hidden motivations. Maybe the person will agree to talk to you, and maybe they won’t. It is “Your mileage may vary” writ large.

Here’s my challenge: On this site, I write about “here’s how to do this extremely satisfying process.” But I am one person with one family. I can write about equipment and how to come up with good questions. But for that initial step to sit down and interview someone, how is it possible for me to move from saying “This is what it’s like to talk with my mother” to “What it is like to interview any mother” ?

We’re all different. My mother likes to talk and share. She has no problem sitting with a recorder and taking part in an interview. Not every mother is like my mother, though.

I want to learn from other people’s experiences. What’s it like when you’ve got a reluctant family member? What is it like if someone refuses to be interviewed? What other struggles do people have? What triumphs? What other advice can I give for family situations that differ from my own family? 

That brings us to the experiences of four genealogists at Jamboree.

Each one interviewed family members. Some interviewees were reticent and difficult, some were willing and open. You’ll find different approaches to the question, “how do I get the person to agree to be interviewed?” You’ll find surprising perceptions that seem (appear but really do not) get in the way of the interview. You’ll also learn how they worked around the reaction “OMG! There’s, you know, RECORDING EQUIPMENT, yikes!” You’ll find out what they did with their interviews afterwards, and get some fantastic ideas.

What about you?

In the comments, feel free to describe your own experiences.

How did it go? What did you talk about? Difficulties in getting family members to talk while recording the conversation? If so, what are the issues that make the process objectionable for your relative? Were there any problems or fiascos? Technical glitches? What have you learned from it? Has your relationship with the interviewee changed as a result of the recording?

The first interview, with Kim von Aspern-Parker (Part 1) (Part 2), will begin the series early next week.

It all began at dinner last Monday. The three of us sat down. Before long, the waiter brought us bread. He took a slice, buttered it, took a bite, and chewed it. Then a story came out, about a woman whose house he went to when he was a boy—about, oh, eight years old or so. He liked to be there on the day she baked bread.

He is my boyfriend’s father, Doc M Sr. He was in town for a visit.

He was born in 1926, the year that Winnie The Pooh was published, and Henry Ford established the 40-hour work week. In the year he was born, Moussolini came into power, and Emperor Hirohito ascended the throne in Japan. World War 1, the war to end all wars, had been over a scant 8 years. He grew up during the Depression in California’s inland empire. His family had to move around a lot because his dad did manual labor, and jobs were, well, scarce.

Between ordering dinner and choosing the wine, this story came out. He did some work for her, chores, maybe mowed her lawn. He loved to show up on the day of the week that she baked bread. She offered him a cookie, but he said no, he was waiting for the bread. That smell of freshly-baked bread—mmmmmmmm! To him, she was old. Ancient. When he visited, they’d talk. He asked her questions about her life.

“Did you know anyone famous or important, anyone I might know about or have read about?”

She told him of the Lincoln Douglas debate. He knew of Lincoln. He was impressed. What was it like? What did Lincoln say?

“‘Oh, I was a young girl, I don’t remember anything that Mr. Lincoln said.’”

Her dad had some political involvement where she grew up—serving on city council or the county government. Her dad had some involvement with putting on this event, which took place on a platform out in a big, open field. She went to the debate with her father. They sat close—either on the edge of the platform, or close enough to have a good view.

In those days if you wanted to know what someone had to say, you went there to witness the event, to hear the person’s words. You didn’t watch it on TV afterwards. You could read about it in the paper, but if you wanted to hear and see it for yourself, you had to go there.  (In fact, one thing Doc M Sr mentioned during his visit was liking to go to the movies to see the newsreels—it was the first time he got a picture of the people he’d heard about or had read about.)

There it was. A cool story. Very unexpected. An eyewitness to history. Though Doc M Sr thought she was ancient, we calculated. Let’s say she was around 8 years old when the debates took place, that’d mean she was born around 1850. So in 1934 or so when Doc M Sr was 8, that’s make her roughly 84 years old. Doc M Sr. is himself 84 years old. I am two people removed from an eyewitness to Lincoln. Two 84-year old people.

What’s there to learn from it? It is enough to marvel at the connection, to trace back to Lincoln through two people. There’s more to it than that:

1. The news is full of 150 years since start of Civil War stories. With all the news commemorating the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, 150 years ago is not that long ago—it’s two long lifespans, back to back, with a little overlap.
2. Add another item to your interview tips and tricks: Who told you stories about things they had seen? What did they tell you? What stories did you hear about from your elders? This goes further back beyond the things you did or the things you witnessed. 
3. You never know what will elicit a story. This story did not come in response to a question. It came from freshly baked bread. Doc M Sr. remembered when this memory was triggered by another occasion where he had freshly-baked bread.

Here’s a little foretaste of the audio we will work with at the workshop, which takes place in a week and a half in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles.

And yes, you can still register!!

Here are some photos from the interview (during the last days of 2010), and four short edited audio excerpts. 

In the FIRST AUDIO RECORDING [MP3, 1:07], Rachel describes the background—how she’s related to Enrico Fermi, and what she was told about him when she was young. (Although she was born in the United States, Rachel grew up in Cambridge, England.)

“I was told a little bit about my grandfather. I knew that he was a physicist, and I knew that he’d won a Nobel Prize. But as I was growing up, I didn’t really understand what a Nobel Prize was.”

SECOND AUDIO RECORDING [MP3, 2:55]:  Rachel describes how she discovered the color snapshot of the mushroom cloud from the first atomic bomb explosion in a box of family photographs.

“And in this shoe box of pictures—you know, full of the normal stuff like babies, picnics, those kinds of things—there was this little tiny faded red photograph with a tiny little sort of cream-colored mushroom cloud in the middle of it. And I was like, ‘Oh my god—what is this?’”

If you have time to listen to one recording, listen to this.

(The explosion: the Trinity Test, July 16, 1945. This was about three weeks before the bombing of Hiroshima)
 

The discovery of these two photos launched a major research project. If there were photographs of the Manhattan Project in her own family collection, what about the collections of other people who were involved with the project? 

In the THIRD AUDIO RECORDING [MP3, 2:55], Rachel describes the research process, and the kinds of images they found. In addition to official documentation photographs, there were candid family snapshots and PR photographs.

“As we were doing more and more research, we realized that the Manhattan Project wasn’t in just one location. The two other main locations were Hanford, Washington and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. And so there were sort of secret towns set up in both those places where people were working on building the first atomic bombs without even knowing what they were working on. And also what was interesting is that a lot of the time people weren’t supposed to be taking photographs. But people are bringing up families and living their lives in these places, so of course they’re taking pictures.”

In the FOURTH AUDIO RECORDING [MP3, 2:02], Rachel touches on the people she met (people with first-hand experience working on the Manhattan Project), and some things she learned about her grandfather.

“I understood better how the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in Chicago really opened the gate. And that code word, ‘The Italian Navigator has landed in the new world’—now I really understood what that meant.”

Each conference features a day of workshops, from an introduction to oral history to other topics. This year, there are seven (count them, seven!) workshops. Two different ways to approach project management, taking an oral history transcript to a theatrical performance, a session all about audio and recording. Those workshops all take place Friday, April 1. (No fooling!)

The two days of computer lab workshops: Digital Audio and Digital Video.

There’s a three-workshop lineup that’s especially good if you’re starting out and want to capture the stories of your community: Intro to Oral History and the two project management workshops.

Friday night is a reception and film screening. It’s open to the public. Saturday is devoted to presentations about ongoing work by oral historians. The conference ends Sunday noon, after a Breakfast/Business meeting, a performance, and a general keynote session.

I hope I see you there. Please let me know if you’re coming, or if you have questions.