Because you found your way to this blog, you’re getting a sneak preview of of the three fabulous keynote speakers: a PBS producer, a New York Times best-selling author, and an Oscar-winning film maker.

PBS Producer: Steve Young
Our American Family: From One Family’s Story to a Documentary Project for PBS
Saturday, November 9

Steve Young, founder and executive producer of Our American Family, will share how a journey to capture his father’s family story grew into a multi-documentary project for public television. He will discuss his methodology from initial contact with a family to the completed film, as well as the process of working within the public television system.

The first half of the twentieth century represents the last era of American life to begin, for most families, largely unchanged from the lives and experiences of previous generations. The documentary series, Our American Family, captures the voices of survivors of that era, providing us with the opportunity to hear firsthand what it meant to be a family during this simpler time, before the world changed.

Oscar Winner: Grace Guggenheim
Past Is Prologue
Sunday, November 10

Grace Guggenheim has been a producer and executive producer of historical documentaries with Guggenheim Productions, Inc., for over twenty-five years, producing more than fifteen documentaries for television and theatrical release for permanent exhibition at museums and presidential libraries around the country. Among her credits are the Academy Award®-nominated A Place in the Land; Academy Award®-nominated D-Day Remembered; and the 1989 Academy Award®-winning film, The Johnstown Flood.

APH Conference attendees will enjoy a rare look behind the scenes as they listen to Grace’s inside stories and watch film clips from her award-winning historical documentary films. She will provide a profound perspective on how we can all be responsible archivists while using public, private, and personal resources.

New York Times Bestselling Author: Steve Roberts
Your Grandmother Never Says, “No Comment”
Tuesday, November 12

Steve Roberts is a passionate advocate for the importance of capturing life stories, as evidenced by his presentation’s title (also one of his favorite sayings). He believes wholeheartedly that capturing and recording the tales of our elders is one of the best gifts you can give your family.

As a journalist with the New York Times and U.S. News, Steve always looked for the personal stories behind the headlines. Eventually turning to his own life, Steve and his wife, Cokie Roberts of NPR’s Morning Edition, published the bestselling book From This Day Forward—a personal account of their marriage and others in American history. In 2005, he wrote My Fathers’ Houses, a memoir of growing up in New Jersey and the ways in which children of immigrants inherit the dreams of their parents and grandparents. As a professor at George Washington University, he came to realize that many families today were living the same immigration story. This led to the publication of From Every End of This Earth: 13 Families and the New Lives They Made in America. In 2011, Steve again partnered with his wife to write Our Haggadah: Uniting Traditions for Interfaith Families.

Steve’s 25-year career with the Times included assignments as bureau chief in Los Angeles and Athens and as Congressional and White House correspondent. His many honors include the Dirksen Award for covering Congress, the Wilbur Award for reporting on religion and politics, the Bender prize as one of George Washington University’s top undergraduate teachers, and four honorary doctorates. He also is a widely read and respected columnist, as well as a TV and radio analyst.

Well, there you have it: three outstanding speakers—and just three of the many reasons to attend the 2013 APH conference, Capital Reflections. Registration opens July 1.

~APH: Life, Stories, People~

About today’s contributor: D. Fran Morley is Content Editor for the Association of Personal Historians. A longtime member, she eagerly looks forward to attending her sixth APH annual conference.

“Grandpa, I heard you talking on the Internet!”

“Grandson, what do you mean?”

“Yes, I heard you talking about landing on the beach in France on D-Day!”

“How can that be?”

“It’s the Library of Congress, Grandpa. They put your interview online for everyone to hear your story.”

One of the most satisfying and interesting experiences of being a member of the Association of Personal Historians is the work our members worldwide have put into saving the stories of veterans, some through individual projects and some, specifically in the United States, through our involvement and  support for the Veterans History Project. (Scroll down for information on a veterans oral history project in Canada and an Australian veterans documentary project.)

The Veterans History Project is part of the American Folklore Center of the Library of Congress and its mission is to collect first-hand stories from real US veterans from all the wars since WWI. Also invited to tell their stories are those family and friends who were actively supporting the war efforts at home including the “Rosie the Riveters” working in war-production factories, USO workers, and volunteers working in local communities.

Individual members of APH have been capturing interviews with veterans and their families for years as part of their normal personal historian projects.

Ben Patton, an APH member from New York, and the grandson of General George Patton, was interviewed on MSNBC about his book, Growing Up Patton: Reflections on Heroes, History and Family Wisdom, and his experiences as a personal historian.

His company Patton Productions has established a user-generated way for families to upload their own video interviews and stories about and with veterans.

In recent years, since becoming an official participant in the Veterans History Project, APH members have volunteered countless hours to help capture the voices and stories of those from the “Greatest Generation” of World War II, and those from the Korean War, Vietnam, the Gulf Wars, and current involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Participation in the Veterans History Project process is very easy. Anyone can become a volunteer to help with this important project. Just click here  for information and guidelines. Or contact any member of APH and they can help find a volunteer to interview your veteran or help get you in the system.

These veterans stories can include audio or video interviews as well as copies of letters, diaries, photos, scrapbooks, etc. These materials will be digitized and made available at the Library of Congress, accessible by future generations of students, scholars, historians, and families—to learn about what really happened in the trenches by those who were there.

Many of these interviews and materials are available to see and hear right now online. From the Veterans History Project home page, click on “search the veterans collection.” You can search by name, service location, ship, or several other categories. Use “Association of Personal Historians” as a search item, and you will find eighty people, so far, who have been interviewed by our members and are in the database. It’s really cool to find the name of someone you know in the database—a grandparent, uncle, or aunt—and with a click a button, hear him talking about his landing on the beaches of D-Day or her relating her experiences as a nurse on Bataan.

The University of Victoria Special Collections Canadian Military Oral History Collection is composed of close to 600 interviews of veterans of WWI, WWII, the Korean War, and the War in Afghanistan. Summaries of all of the interviews can be found by searching the Canadian Military Oral History Collection database. Online access to the first 200 interviews of the collection is available here.

To accompany Australians at War, an eight-hour TV documentary, this website includes written excerpts from diaries and letters, with photos, sketches and other material, from Australian veterans, ranging from the Boer War through today’s Peacekeeping efforts.

~APH: Life, Story, People~

About today’s contributor: RJ McHatton, an APH member from Oregon, has been capturing video interviews with veterans as a volunteer for the VHP since 2005, even before becoming a member of APH. Through his company, Inventive Productions, Inc., he has interviewed veterans from Battle of the Bulge, D-Day, Pearl Harbor, Vietnam, Chosin Reservoir, Guadacanal, Iwo Jima, and many more. See sample clips of RJ’s video interviews with VHP vets here. 

It’s exquisite sadness—all the memories of wet hair, tired toddlers, and clean pajamas—come flooding back as we finally close the door and staunch the light from that warm chapter of our lives.

Not surprisingly, the task takes ages, as we pause over every title . . .

They’re not just books! They’re little time machines, capable of transporting us back to golden, gloaming moments—all the more gilded by the passage of time and the fading memories of the hard stuff. So, most of us don’t actually throw or give away that ratty copy of Where the Wild Things Are. We store it in the attic or in the garage.

Then there are clothes . . . and tiny shoes . . . and toys: I wrote about it in a post I called Family History Embedded in Toys on my own blog, Video Biography Central. This has been a year of many such nostalgic musings for me as my two oldest children are now away at college.

But the big struggle in our lives this year has not been dealing with the books. It has been to finally dismantle the kids’ outside fort. It has sat in our garden for all of the children’s lives and has hosted all manner of tiny occupants. It saw use right to the end—high school seniors sat in its rather confined upstairs space during an end-of-year party last year. Unfortunately, rats have had it to themselves for the last 12 months or so.

So it was time for the fort to go. And with it, the inevitable attenuation of many of our fondest summer memories. Because memories attach to things, don’t they? Not always, but usually. If you have ever revisited your old elementary school, you can attest to the flood of fresh recollections that came flooding in, seemingly attaching to the buildings and stairs and handrails themselves.

I often make use of this phenomenon in my video biography work. I love to take the subject back to some important place from their past and record the results, as I did for this lovely Irish couple from New Jersey: New Lives in America.

And speaking of buildings and schools, there are smells of course! Powerful memories can attach to smells. Catching a chance whiff of sun-dried washing can bring you back to the time you helped Mom pin the clothes up on the line all those years ago—when folks actually had washing lines.

Sadly, a fort can’t be packed away in the garage or an attic like old picture books, ready for another chance acquaintance and that happy/painful rush of remembrance. Not our fort anyway.

Fortunately for us, our need to junk the fort and our reluctance to destroy a vessel packed with the echoes of happy times coincided with the spinach, kale, and chard whole-food craze that is sweeping the world. I love green smoothies! But I don’t entirely trust the produce I buy (pesticides, freshness, etc). So it hit us like a ton of lumber: why not repurpose the wood and build garden beds for vegetables?

Now, some three months later, I have my spinach, kale, and swiss chard. And I have my memories too—right there in the wood that encloses the plants—as you can see in the before and after shots to the right.

Memories can live in many places: photographs, books, buildings, DVDs, and video—and, it turns out, even with old wood.

~APH: Life, Story, People~

A version of this post appeared earlier this spring in Jane’s blog, Video Biography Central.

About today’s contributor: Jane Lehmann-Shafron co-founded Your Story Here Video Biography, a documentary production company that specializes in video biography and family history documentary. Based in Orange County, CA, she creates award-winning films that have been featured in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted through her website. 

The Literary Digest, cover image by Norman Rockwell (Public Domain), used via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve also learned that there is no set timetable to this. I’ve recently completed my own memoir that deals with painful periods from my past, including losing both of my parents at a young age. Everyone has to come to terms on his or her own about when is the right time to share difficult stories, whether they are intended for public consumption or just for family and closest friends.

Recently I worked with a man who decided the time was right to tell his story. His is a story of survival under the most horrendous of circumstances—what has gone down in history as the Bataan Death March.

Nineteen-year-old “John” wanted to see the world after graduating high school in June 1941, so he enlisted in the United States Army Air Force with two friends. Given a choice of assignments, John chose the Philippines.

Only months later—December 7, 1941—the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The following day the United States declared war on Japan. John’s unit came under fire from Japanese warplanes, and the Battle of the Philippines began. The Americans were outgunned by the Japanese and suffered high casualty counts. They retreated to the Bataan peninsula, hoping that other U.S. troops would come to their aid. None arrived, so the men fought until they could no longer hold out.

In April 1942, the Americans surrendered. Historical records confirm the Japanese inflicted unspeakable horrors on their prisoners as they forcibly marched 75,000 men from Bataan to prison camps in the north, beginning on April ninth. The prisoners endured great brutality and tremendous hardship on the sixty-mile trek in tropical heat without food or water. The exact death toll was never determined but is estimated to be around 18,000 men, counting U.S. and Filipino prisoners of war.

John survived this inhumane trek and lived to tell his story.

“I was lucky,” John said. “Because I was in the back of the line, I could see what happened to those who resisted or fell. They were shot, stabbed, or decapitated. I kept walking and learned that my will to live was fierce. I never gave up.”

Years later, John returned to the Philippines. He bears no ill will towards the Japanese. He says that he will never forget his wartime ordeal, yet he forgives his former enemies.

When I think of John’s survival and his struggles, I apply the lessons he learned to my own life. I know that the will to live is strong. In her books, Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, a writer, counselor, and clinical professor of family and community medicine at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine, calls this the “Life Force.”

I also understand that telling our story—in writing or in audio or video—can be a part of coming to terms with tough times and wrongs inflicted upon us. Some wise personal historian once said, “Telling your story isn’t therapy, but it is therapeutic.” I believe that, and that’s a big part of why I am honored to help people like John tell and save their stories.

I think the key to helping people with stories like this is to establish rapport with your subject, research what they endured, ask open-ended questions, and then sit back and listen. Be aware of your subject’s responses and, if the interview becomes too intense, give him the option to stop talking or continue at another time.

What about you? How have you worked to tell your own stories of survival or helped others?

~APH: Life, Story, People~

About today’s contributor: Libby Atwater has been a member of the Association of Personal Historians since 1998 and served on the association’s board. Through her business, Choose Your Words, she has been telling people’s stories for more than twenty years and specializes in print and audio biographies. She contributed to the APH anthology, My Words Are Gonna Linger: The Art of Personal History, and recently completed a memoir of her early years, What Lies Within, available on her website. Its sequel, What Took You So Long? is in progress.

The Open Window photo by siegertmarc (The open window, uploaded by MaybeMaybeMaybe) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons. Other photos courtesy Libby Atwater.

“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. . . . And suddenly the memory revealed itself. . . .”

My “madeleine,” or memory trigger, was revealed to me as a cousin described how her father had made her crepes for dessert. I wrote back how I remembered when my French grandmother—her great grandmother—used to make crepes for me. No special pan or fancy recipe—just flour, milk and eggs beat to just the right consistency to spread in a small frying pan to a thin sheet that slid off the pan onto a plate. No fancy fillings either—we did not add brandy and light them on fire like you might find in a fancy restaurant. We just added sugar, and then folded them in quarters before biting in.

I used to pretend that the crepes were like a round piece of paper you would fold into quarters and then cut out shapes to make a snowflake. I would take small, careful bites along the sides and at the tip, then open the crepe to see what pattern I had created. Of course, the sugar would then fall out, but it didn’t seem to matter. I just refolded the snowflake and ate it quickly, knowing the next was on its way.

My mother also made crepes for me—of course, using the same recipe that her mother had used—the one that had no measurements—just ingredients mixed together by feel. My mother would say, “I don’t measure anything—I just know what it is supposed to look like.” Crepes were a special treat—I associate eating them with cold, snowy days when I had come home from playing, taking off my boots, eager to get warm, sometimes even sitting by the heat vent.

When I was old enough to make them myself, I decided I had had enough of the recipe with no measurements and made my mother show me exactly how much flour, milk and eggs she put in so I could document the recipe. My children weren’t as enamored with the dessert as I had been, but I didn’t care—I just ate them myself.

I wonder how long this recipe will be passed down and what memories it will trigger in future generations. Maybe the crepes will be replaced with something new—like the dumplings my children seem to prefer from their Chinese grandmother.

It doesn’t really matter whether it’s a Madeleine, a crepe or a dumpling.  It’s the memory that counts.

My grandmother’s crepe recipe:

Put 1 cup of flour in a bowl. Add 1½ cups milk slowly and mix with whisk to keep the mixture smooth. Add 2 eggs and 2 Tbsp. melted butter. Grease small frying pan or crepe pan with just a small amount of butter (or cooking spray for a modern touch). Don’t use oil to grease the pan—the crepe batter won’t spread—and turn heat to medium to medium-high. Pour in about ¼ cup batter (depending on the size of the pan) and rotate the pan to cover the bottom with a thin layer of batter. Cook just 1-2 minutes on each side until lightly browned. I discard the first crepe because it doesn’t seem to cook evenly and falls apart. Sprinkle crepes with confectioner’s sugar and fold or roll. Eat right away while hot! Makes about 8 crepes.

~APH: Life, Story, People~

About today’s contributor: Dani Schor is a rare Washington, D.C. native. She looks forward to welcoming her colleagues to her city for Capital Reflections, the annual international conference of the Association of Personal Historians, November 8-12, 2013. Dani’s personal history business is Personal Story Keeper. She has more than twenty-five years of writing and public affairs experience. 

These simple words convey a profound message; one that any personal historian understands and talks about—probably on a daily basis. Most of us in this profession speak to the everyday lives of the average person. We know that everyone has a story to tell and a history to be recorded.

But sometimes even the most famous of words, or the story behind those words, can be lost if not properly documented and recorded. And so it was in Birmingham, Alabama regarding the spot where Dr. Martin Luther King wrote the now-famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”

On Good Friday in 1963, the Reverends Fred Shuttlesworth, Ralph Abernathy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. were arrested while taking part in peaceful Civil Rights demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama.

Most people know of the arrest; they know of the letter that King wrote while incarcerated, and they may even know that King began his letter by scribbling in the margins of the Birmingham News, the only paper he had available. What people don’t know—including many people in Birmingham—is where the old jail was located.

In his article for the statewide news website, www.AL.com, writer Kyle Whitmire says that lack of knowledge is understandable given changes in the city. He writes of the street that passes by the spot today:

“… it zips past Memorial Park on the right and the Birmingham city fleet maintenance shed on the left. The neon signs of about a half dozen bail bond companies blink at cars before the flow empties into Titusville and ends abruptly a half mile farther at Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. If you didn’t slow down, you might not know you drove past something important. The sign outside calls it the Birmingham Police Department Detention Division, but history has another name for it. This is the Birmingham Jail.”

Whitmire notes that the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute has a recreation of King’s cell that includes a door from the old jail, but in the decades since the Civil Rights era, the actual location where King wrote his letter has been forgotten, engulfed by the other municipal facilities that were built around and on the site.

That’s about to change as of today, April 16, 2013. Thanks to a joint project of Leadership Birmingham and Alabama Tourism, a historical marker will be unveiled at the site today. King’s daughter Bernice, who was just two weeks old when her father wrote the letter, will be among the speakers at the dedication. The Birmingham Public Library is sponsoring a reading of King’s letter, which will also be read today at more than 160 sites around the world, at schools and libraries around the South and as far away as Australia.

The powerful words written fifty years ago by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. will never be forgotten. Now the spot where he sat to write those words will also be commemorated—and remembered.

~APH: Life, Story, People~

About today’s contributor: D. Fran Morley is a freelance writer and editor who works from her home in Fairhope, Alabama, about four hours south of Birmingham. A longtime member of the Association of Personal Historians (APH), she frequently teaches workshops to help people preserve their own stories. She is also Content Editor for APH. 

1963 Civil Rights march photo courtesy Birmingham Public Library Archives

In the NY Times editorial that sparked both posts, So Many Snapshots, So Few Voices Saved, writer Verlyn Klinkenborg noted that there was a lag of 60 years between 1900 when the introduction of the Kodak Brownie camera made it easy to take snapshots . . .

. . . and the 1960s, when cassette tape recorders made home recording simple and inexpensive, but of course there is nothing difficult about recording the voice today. A smartphone can capture voice as easily as it takes a photo.

So why are people hesitant to record voices? I have some thoughts.

• Voice is “alive.” It is active and vibrant and multi-dimensional—maybe too alive. We delete photos with press of a button, but it is harder to do that with a recording because a voice feels more real—almost as if we are deleting the person.

• Capturing voice seems more permanent. Most of us fear having what we say “caught” (or recorded) because we might say something stupid. Some people say they don’t like the sound of their own voice. Hearing our own voice can seem strange. We’ve gotten used to seeing ourselves in photos. Not so with hearing our voice in recordings.

• Voice/stories need a listener. They come alive when there is a listener. There is an audible difference when we tell our stories to a listener rather than just talking into an unfeeling electronic device. I recently broke both wrists and had been meaning to record the experience before I forgot some of the funny details. But I knew it would be better told to an audience, and it was! (Yes, I recorded my “After the Fall” Toastmasters speech—and yes, even broken wrists elicit some funny moments.)

Voice matters most when it is someone we know and care about. I never play snippets of stories I’ve recorded as a demonstration because that voice is irrelevant unless it is someone the listener knows. Voice is important only when it is a known voice. And when it is, hearing that voice is much more important than what is actually said.

Children are fascinated by recorders and want to record their own voices. What they actually say is irrelevant; even the process of recording is secondary. All they really want is to hear their own voices! My grandson Trenton is a good example: Click on the story “Brother Bites Brother” on my website to hear his recording.

I believe the key to why we are reluctant to record the voices of those we love is best stated by Klinkenborg in his editorial when he says the human voice contains extraordinary intimacy. It has been said that the soul is in the voice. So when we record someone’s voice, it can seem incredibly invasive. Maybe it is so real that we feel we need to ask permission to “capture” it. We don’t want to be caught stealing someone’s soul!

After someone dies, we put together photos of the person, to honor and remember our loved one. But the voice of a departed loved one may be more powerful than a photo. The voice may be too painful to hear, at least for a time, as voice brings a person to memory more strongly and vividly than any photograph.

How many times do we learn that the only recording remaining after someone is gone is an intro on a voice mail message— “you’ve reached Chris, I’m not home, please leave a message.” People will go to almost any length and expense to keep a voice mail intro or message from being erased. Why? Because hearing that voice is so “real.” And, when the time is right, how wonderful it is to be able to hear that voice again and again. As Klinkenborg writes, “The sound alone will say everything someday.”

So, what can we do to help each other recognize and experience the value of the human voice?

Try this: Pick up the phone and call someone important to you; maybe someone you haven’t talked with for a long time. Take time to bask in the joy of listening to his or her voice—not just what is being said, but the voice.

You’ve taken a first step. Now get out your recorder . . .

~~APH: Life, Story, People~~

About today’s contributor: A child of the 60s, Gloria Nussbaum feels she was born at the opportune time to make her the perfect age to be a Personal Historian. She is old enough to remember wringer washing machines and transistor radios but young enough to love her iPad! She discovered the Association of Personal Historians in 2001 and that same year began her business, Real to Reel, recording personal stories. Gloria is passionate about preserving the actual voice of the storyteller.  

Photo credits: Kodak camera by Håkan Svensson. Cassette recorder by Christian Giersing. Permission for both photos under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.