Memorabilia

No, not directly oral history. But an adjunct, something that often accompanies delving into someone's history. Letters, scrapbooks, diaries, mementos, or things. just. saved., that's what's in this category

A shoebox of photos

(This is in memory of Steve, and is for Debbi) His sister looked through the shoebox of photos. “Wow! I’ve never seen these before!” Sister and Mom sat in chairs on the grass in the backyard. I sat in one of the group of chairs encircling the metal firepit. Together they paged through snapshots. His Mom held slides up to the afternoon sun.

“Dad’s hobby was photography,” Sister said. “Did you see this one? the one where he’s standing in front of that car? What kind of car is that?”

My boyfriend looks, and after a thoughtful pause, he says, “Cadillac.”

It’s a Cadillac with a long front end, maybe late 30s, early 40s. A car that you’d see at those classic car shows. The kind of car you’d wave to if you saw it barrelling along the freeway. The kind of car that brings a smile to your face in the year 2010.

“He’s always posed in front of cars,” Sister says. She and Mom look at the snapshots of toddlers in a tall tile bath. “Who is that with Steve?”

Mom looks, and says a name.

(Alas, I forgot the name. This is not my family, so the names don’t register as strongly.)

Steve, the one toddler in the bath, just died.... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Memorabilia • Photographs
(1) Comments • Permalink

Family heirlooms and their stories

Here’s my postscript to this brief article: Make records of family heirlooms. In response to a reader question about what kind of info to write down about family heirlooms, Syracuse.com’s Sheila Burns says yes, write it down - both the object’s description, and additional details about its use in the family. [via GenWeekly] Don’t just write it, record it! Heirlooms are wonderful story triggers for family interviews. If you’re stuck for a starting place, or a way to get more stories from family members, ask questions about objects and heirlooms.

Each of the questions Burns poses about the object are wonderful triggers for a recorded interview.

Identify, photograph and maintain records of your treasures. Describe the history and condition of each object. Who owned it? Who made, purchased or used the object. Where did the person live? How was the item used? What did the item mean to your family?

Good interviews use lots of open-ended questions, the kind that lead to telling a story, rather than a simple “yes” or “no.” Each of these question starts with those wonderful words that elicit stories—Who? Where? How? What?

I can almost hear the story as it unwinds from one of those questions.

Burns talks about taking the story and attaching it to the item. Once you create an audio or video interview, that’s harder. But you can put the story with an image of the object, at least.

That pocket watch you... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Interviewing • Memorabilia
(0) Comments • Permalink

Not your father’s iPod… well, actually it is (a Walkman)

For Sony Walkman’s 30th anniversary, 13-year old Scott Campbell tries it for a week. Hilarious for us oldsters to see our old fave equipment through a young-person’s eyes.

My dad had told me it was the iPod of its day.
He had told me it was big, but I hadn’t realised he meant THAT big. It was the size of a small book.

Size? cumbersome. Handy belt-clip, but with that weight? (you hafta read the article to find out its effect for current 13 year olds).

When I wore it walking down the street or going into shops, I got strange looks, a mixture of surprise and curiosity, that made me a little embarrassed.

Though one teacher got nostalgic. Two tantalizing questions:

How long did it take for Campbell to figure out that there was a side B to this tape?

And how did he create his own impromptu “Shuffle” effect?

You hafta read the article to find out the answers.

A couple of pluses: two output jacks for sharing music with friends, and a power port to plug... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Audio • Audio: Hardware • Digitality • Longevity • Memorabilia
(0) Comments • Permalink

News Roundup

Recent news stories that caught my eye from Austin TX, Lewiston NY, San Diego CA, Washington DC. Capturing stories of aging Mexican-Americans, Archival treasure-trove at Odd Fellows lodge, call for Washington DC secretaries, and the dwindling number of holocaust survivors.

Austin, Texas: Austin history project aims to preserve voices of elders.
Mexican American Oral History Project held a workshop this last weekend to train people to conduct interviews. Interviews will be conducted throughout the month of May. The article opens with a nice description of “the problem” that these oral histories seek to solve:

Many of us have parents and family who are entering the twilight of their rich lives. They have stories to tell — tales of bedazzling beauty and joy, of profound loss and heartache, of the mundane moments that fill the in between. They bear witness to history.

Among Mexican Americans, that history usually gets passed along orally, says Gloria Espitia, a neighborhood liaison for the Austin History Center. The trouble is that most families don’t record the stories of their elders, leaving historians and researchers little or nothing to work with and leaving Mexican Americans missing from... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Memorabilia • Oral history in the news
(0) Comments • Permalink

Restored Reel-to-Reel Tape Decks as Art.

A Gallery of Custom Tape Decks, wherein Jeff Jacobs restores old audio technology as art, via BoingBoing Gadgets. I love the meta-line here. Jacobs restores tape decks, which I think of as tools for restoring (and digitizing) audio. If tape decks are art, then there’s a ton of art at Richard Hess’s audio tape restoration studio! In decades to come, when those machines grow ever scarcer, the BoingBoing post points to another source to find those long-obsolete tape decks of the world: the personal collections of geeks.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Audio • Audio: Hardware • Longevity • Memorabilia • Restoration
(0) Comments • Permalink

It’s our past coming back to life

Wow. 32-page typewritten transcript — from 100 years ago — provides a description of a pictoral history of Sioux nation. The Twin Cites (MN) family finds it in a trunk of Grandma’s old possessions (Great-Grandma typed it up), and gives a copy of it to members of the Lakota tribe.

Libby Holden [pictured with transcript, above] said her grandmother, who inherited the oral history, never spoke about it. It’s possible she never knew she had the document. When she died, her possessions were stored at the family’s printing company.

Last summer, Libby Holden and several other family members began sorting through the items. Holden says one big musty old trunk was especially interesting. [... It] contained the White Horse oral history. She said it’s possible the items were packed away by her great-grandmother and left untouched by her descendants.

Holden’s great grandparents had lots of contacts with Native Americans; their great grandfather was a lawyer representing members of the Lakota tribe, and their great-grandmother was the one who typed up the interview. (The trunk that held the oral history transcript also held many other artifacts).

The front page says ‘transcript of the pictorial history of the Sioux nation as kept by... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Memorabilia • Oral history in the news
(0) Comments • Permalink

Jeannette Rankin, first woman congressperson

Transcript of an oral history interview with Rankin. I just read two letters written by my Great Grandma Fannie in 1917 that refer to Jeanette Rankin (she was elected in 1916, began her term in Congress in April, 1917… This was when the state of Montana granted women the right to vote, but before the right to vote was won nationwide.). Rankin wrote my great-grandmother to ask her advice on matters of “Indian Affairs.” Fannie taught school on the Crow reservation.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Memorabilia • Oral History Projects • Personal History
(2) Comments • Permalink

Shades of the Departed Guest Blog

Hooray for Footnote Maven, who invited me to guest blog at Shades of the Departed. My post is about interviewing people about photo albums. Why photos rock, and what sorts of practical things you can do during an interview. You may already be a winner! Read the entry to find out why. (I certainly won-in a slightly different way. Thanks to fM for the nudge to write that post. If it weren’t for that deadline, I might’ve waited a little while longer before blogging here again.)

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Interviewing • Memorabilia • Personal History • Photographs
(0) Comments • Permalink

Creating Memories Using Maps

A blog called Very Spatial links to a number of sources for using maps to create (or preserve) memories. An old post here was one destination, but the others in the post are worth a peek. Did you know the USGS has a Maps and Genealogy page?

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Memorabilia • Personal History
(1) Comments • Permalink

Holiday visits: Witness to an Interview

Photo albums are a thing of beauty. I got to witness an oral history interview about a photo album on my Christmas holiday travels. I was the silent third party, operating the equipment, and asking the occasional question to pull out a few more details. Son brings Father a photo album, put together by Son’s Mother. The album was discovered after Mother’s death. It covers the time in Mother’s and Father’s early life together, before the kids were born, and before the Mother and Father’s divorce. Father is the only one alive who can describe what’s going on in the photos. Here are a few observations I made about interviewing with photo albums.

Photos are a fabulous memory trigger. When sparking a conversation about someone’s recollections, how do you get to the well of memories inside a person’s mind? Questions may trigger… they are words to tap that well, but that recollection-well still resides inside the person’s mind. Pictures are external triggers. They bring back the memories for the interviewee. Plus, being external, the interviewer can make his or her own observations about what’s in the picture, and use them to elicit more information. “Tell me about the car” or “Look at the uniform you wore! When did you get that uniform?” or “Whose house is that?”

Interviewing over photo albums For The Record.  It’s wholly natural to speak in gestures. “Well, the whatchamacallit was about like so [gesture indicating size]” or “That’s her [pointing to one of several pictures on a page].” Both interviewer and interviewee understand the meaning, but that meaning needs... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Interviewing • Memorabilia • Photographs
(3) Comments • Permalink

Contents of attic seeks family

In New Zealand, discovery of a suitcase full of memorabilia. Family sought— Mr. Gale or Alma Ansin. [via Megan’s Roots World]

The suitcase, filled with family photographs and personal letters, was found last Friday by builders working in the attic of Caleb Fryatt’s Tweed St home.

Mr Fryatt is hoping to find relatives of the person who owned the case and has appealed for them to get in touch.

He first found out about the suitcase on Monday when he received a phone call from Peter Gooding of Renovation Masters.

Mr Fryatt said he was amazed to find what it contained.

“The stuff in there is just incredible. It’s a very interesting find,” he said. “Once you start looking through it, you don’t want to stop. It’s pretty addictive.”

Among the letters and photos are military buttons, death certificates and clippings from the Bay of Plenty Times dating back to 1939.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Memorabilia
(1) Comments • Permalink

Historic online eye candy

Grandma’s ‘37 Road Trip. Not digital scrapbooking, but a scrapbook, digitized. [via Making Light Particles] Hmm. I’ve got a scrapbook that includes Grandma climbing Mt. Rainier. Hmmm. scanfest? Oh, that was Sunday.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Memorabilia
(0) Comments • Permalink

A blaze of story

Southern California is burning up. Again. best wishes to Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings. I just saw that evacuations are being issued for Chula Vista, where he lives.

My brother lives in San Diego county; he got a 6am robo-call saying No School and other local news alerts related to fires in the area. I always think about the things I’d take if I had to (bummer about that small car!). In his case, he keeps meaning to unearth a tape he made with our Grandpa. Er, this is a thought I have on his behalf, not a thought he has.

Also, the San Bernardino Mountain fire is threatening the family cabin. I think this is the third alarm. First was in 2003. We keep saying that the only thing worth keeping and saving are the three log books. Each visitor to the cabin writes in them. They date back to 1968.

I remember after the 2003 fires that ravaged San Diego County, I saw a news story about a library that ran a program that was a cross... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Memorabilia • Personal History
(9) Comments • Permalink

NY Times to open up old archives

(upated) The news story as others see it: The paywall’s coming down. But this little tidbit about old, old archives caught my eye:

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain.

Score!!! I’m reading letters from around this time. Stories about my grandmother appeared in the NYTimes. There’s gotta be other stuff that’s just plain interesting that’ll appear.

UPDATE: Here’s a press release that discusses the fate of stories between 1923 and 1986: “Archives for the years 1923 - 1986 are available to be purchased in single or 10-article packages.”

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • History • Memorabilia
(1) Comments • Permalink

Papa’s Diary Project

New blog discovery! Blogging grandpa’s 1924 diary. Matt Unger (grandson) transcribes Harry Scheurman (his grandfather)’s diary. An entry a day, a post a day. Plus commentary. [via Digitization 101] Another example of A small daily task that I mentioned in my Letters in the Attic post.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Cool Website • History • Memorabilia
(0) Comments • Permalink