‘The Older It Gets, the Better It Gets’

Historian Bob McCracken of Pahrump, Nev., wrote an interesting article in the Pahrump Valley Times about the variety of information sources utilized by historians. One of his favorite sources, he says is the oral history, for it collects firsthand information from people who witnessed historical events at close range.

“Most of the time,” he writes, “you can't get closer to an event in the past than by talking to someone who was there. And an oral history never gets old; in fact, the older it gets, the better it gets.”

McCracken particularly values the recollections of ordinary people. “It is my belief,” he contends, “that nearly every human being has an oral history in them. In a better world, a formal oral history would be conducted with every willing older individual. The benefits to society of such a program would be enormous.”

Oral Histories of Hurricane Survivors

The University of Southern Mississippi is collecting oral histories from survivors of Hurricane Katrina, to be archived in the university's Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage . You can read about it in this article from the Jackson Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson, Miss.

(You are invited to submit posts to this blog; just email them to Chuck Bartling.)

How many have you interviewed?

Have you kept track of the number of family or veterans histories you have recorded?

Whether you have or not, you should read this story in the Asbury Park (N.J.) Press about a local historian who has compiled 249 interviews with veterans.

Carol Fowler of Middletown, N.J., was one of 14 oral historians honored last month by the Library of Congress for their work with the Veterans History Project.

"I have just great memories of all of them," she said. "I've (become) good friends with some of them. They're a part of me."

Fowler said the experience has given her hope.

"It's made me walk around every day with a smile on my face," she said. "It's just uplifted me. I feel so enriched by their friendship and the sharing they have done, the personal sharing of their sacrifice."

(You are invited to submit posts to this blog; just email them to Chuck Bartling.)

Following in the Footsteps of Studs Terkel

The legendary Studs Terkel and his protégé, Alex Kotlowitz, were featured on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer last night on Public Broadcasting. The gist of the feature was that these two prominent Chicago-based authors utilize oral histories to gather material for their award-winning books.

On an earlier program, Terkel declared that “what I'm worried about is a national Alzheimer's Disease. That is, there weren't no yesterday. There was a Depression years ago, and the same ones who say there's too much regulation, too much big government, are the ones whose daddies' and granddaddies' butts were saved by government regulation after the crash of 1929. They prayed to the government of Franklin D. and the New Deal, ‘save us,’ and it did. And so we have seemed to have forgotten that, or being not taught that. That's the part that gets me, this national Alzheimer's Disease. So all my books, certainly this one, tries to recreate a memory of what was, and what is, and what can be. Basically, that's what it's about.”

And that’s essentially what we do as oral historians. We capture those memories of everyday people in order that their recollections will not be lost to the generations that follow.

(You are invited to submit posts to this blog; just email them to Chuck Bartling.)

Oral History in Tucson

Follow this link to read an article in the Tucson Citizen about an author who utilized an oral history technique to document her own family's history.

The author, Elizabeth McCauslin, interviewed a number of elderly family members to capture their recollections of times gone past. She collected them into a book, titled Recuerdos: Memories of a Childhood in Tucson.

An interesting comment from Jim Turner, community services historian with the Arizona Historical Society: "The only bad oral history is the one you don't do."

McCauslin said the book took seven years to complete, including countless hours of research and conversations with family members.

(You are invited to submit posts to this blog; just email them to Chuck Bartling.)

Productive Questions

Unexpected questions can often yield surprisingly productive results. I’d be grateful if you would share such questions with the other readers of this blog. Submit the questions, and some of the surprising answers you received, by email to me, and I will post the results on this blog.

To get you started in your thinking, let me give a few examples:

What were your duties as a small child?
What did Saturday or Sunday mean to you as you were growing up?
What holiday was most special to your family, and how did you celebrate it?
When and how did you learn to drive a car?
When you were small, what did you hope to do when you grew up?

Click here to find 119 questions that were abstracted from Virginia Allee’s “A Family History Questionnaire” in the October 1978 issue of Family Heritage Magazine.

Oral Histories from New Zealand

The United States is not the only country that is collecting oral histories from its World War II veterans. New Zealand has a program that it calls "From Memory." Its website contains background information about the program as well as some sample questions that interviewers can ask.

(You are invited to submit posts to this blog; just email them to Chuck Bartling.)

Some Questions To Ask

Most people can talk forever about themselves, which makes holding them to three hours to be a major challenge.

For us new interviewers, however, one of our biggest fears is running out of questions with 30 minutes of blank tape staring us in the face. I suppose it's the oral historian's version of writer's block.

Well, I found a website, called StoryCorps. net, that offers a number of helpful hints for interviewers. On that site I discovered a list of questions that would come in handy after the narrator has been led through his/her entire life history. Perhaps they will be useful to you.

Here they are (slightly edited):

What was the happiest moment of your life? The saddest?
Who was the most important person in your life? Can you tell me about him or her?
What are the most important lessons you've learned in life?
What words of wisdom would you like to pass along to your family and friends?
What are you proudest of in your life?
How has your life been different than what you'd imagined?
How would you like to be remembered?
What do you most regret?
What invention...or new product...has had the biggest impact on your life?
What is there that you've not told me but want to tell me now?

Can you add to this list? Remember, you are encouraged to submit posts to this blog; just email them to Chuck Bartling.

Veterans Project Generates Interest

The phone began figuratively ringing off the hook in the offices of the North Shore Senior Center after a feature article on the Veterans History Project appeared in a number of publications affiliated with the Pioneer Press.

Headlined "Project Gets Veterans Talking," the article, by staff writer Ken Goze, was largely based upon an extensive interview with NSSC volunteer interviewer Bob Romain, who noted that veterans often get quite emotional as they relate some of the gorier details of life on the World War II battlefield.

Audio clips of some of the interviews of veterans that have been archived by the U.S. Library of Congress can be retrieved from the library's web site.

Because of the demand generated by the article, the NSSC is currently training more volunteers to conduct interviews for the government project.

(You are invited to submit posts to this blog; just email them to Chuck Bartling.)

How This Blog Came To Be

On June 1, 2005, a group of volunteer interviewers at the North Shore Senior Center in the Chicago suburb of Northfield were having lunch and commenced to exchange helpful interviewing hints and regale each other with tales from the oral history interviewing front. This face-to-face exchange of shop talk was so valuable that someone suggested we ought to do this more often. That's when I opened my big mouth and declared, "We need a blog." Someone responded, "What's a blog?"

Well, this is a blog. It's a collection of information, called "posts" in blogspeak, that is accessible to anyone with a computer and access to the internet. To keep it simple, and to maintain some semblance of order, I have volunteered to edit the posts and maintain this thing.

But its success depends upon your input. If you have something to contribute, send your post to me by email, and I will see that it is added to the blog. In the meantime, spread the word to other oral historians you might meet and invite them to participate. The more the merrier.

-- Chuck Bartling, Evanston, Illinois