Range of Services

• Interviewing Services: A skilled interviewer asks you questions about your past, putting you at ease and helping jog your memory. Your stories may be recorded on audiotape, CD, videotape or DVD. Most people need from six to twelve hours to tell their life stories. If you want to cover only a short period in your life, you'll need less time, while if you have many adventures to cover or multiple family members to be interviewed, you might need more time.

• Audio Services: A personal historian will provide professional recording equipment and ask all the appropriate questions to record your story in as much detail as you desire. These recordings on audiotape or CD are keepsakes themselves, because they allow your children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to hear your stories in your own voice. The personal historian will present the tapes or CDs to you in attractive packaging that will safely preserve them.

• Transcription & Editing of Tapes: If your stories have been taped and you want your interview available in an easy-to-read form, a professional transcriber can enter your tape recordings into a computer for easy editing. Your tapes are transcribed verbatim, including both questions and answers. You may choose to keep the interview in Q&A format or you may decide you need a writer-editor to organize your answers into an easy-to-read narrative.

  A professional APH editor ensures that your story reads smoothly and clearly while preserving your own distinct style. The editor can correct your grammar, spelling, punctuation and sentence structure, enabling readers to follow and understand your stories easily. Then you make the final changes in the manuscript before it is printed.

• Writing Services & Ghostwriting: Behind many books, speeches and scripts is the invisible hand of the writer or ghostwriter. These professionals help you write your book the way you would if you had the time and the professional writing skills. They help you organize and revise the stories, add transitions and bring out the details to make them more vibrant. The writer may be credited as your collaborator or co-author, or left secret as a "ghostwriter."

• Classes, Workshops, Lectures & Training: Life-story writing classes and workshops can get you started writing your stories and motivate you to keep going. Experienced teachers guide you through the process of calling up and describing your memories, moment-by-moment, as they unfolded. These sessions, whether private or in a group setting, can be stimulating, moving, thought-provoking and fun! Many personal historians offer classes, workshops, lectures and presentations for organizations and events such as: family reunions, schools, senior centers, nursing homes, hospices, hospitals, historical societies, residential communities, religious and ethnic communities.

• Video Services: Professional videographers capture you the way you are now, in your environment, for your descendants to see, hear, and enjoy. You can tell your best stories, show your most valuable keepsakes, and demonstrate your favorite place or activity. Videographers can create a montage of your old films, home videos, photographs, and favorite songs and edit them together into an entertaining and moving film. Video projects are often created to celebrate a special birthday, anniversary, or family reunion. The resulting video or DVD will be a keepsake for your family and future generations.

• Photo Services & Film Preservation: Personal historians with photo expertise can help organize and format your photos into a book, a collage depicting events from your life, or a calendar showing important dates with pictures of your family. If you are making prints that you want to last well into the future, you can have them specially processed to ensure the fewest possible damaging trace chemicals will remain on the print. New photo enhancement software has improved the way photos are restored and preserved at much more reasonable prices than previously—without harming the original. If the photographs that tell your life story are torn, dirty, faded, scratched, wrinkled, cracked or water-damaged, personal historians with this expertise can scan them and make corrections that remove the defects. These experts can also archive your photos digitally or help you find safe ways to display them in frames or photo albums, in your life history book or on your Web site.

• Multimedia Services: New technologies allow some personal historians to create awesome gifts for family members who own computers and/or DVD players. Both CDs and DVDs store text, photographs, videos, music, and voice recordings in a beautiful presentation that will captivate even the youngest family members. These expert APH members can show you the amazing new ways that they can vividly record and preserve a family's heritage. Personal Historians can work with various sources—your old home movies, videos, and sound recordings—and publish them in the format you want.

• Family Web Site & Genealogy: If you have a family Web site or want to create one where your family can preserve and share their stories and pictures, technically savvy personal historians can help you design and build it. They can combine audio, video, text, photos, diaries, letters, heirlooms, and more—to create an interactive multimedia experience. Those who are experts in Genealogy can help you create and build your family tree and add it to your book, CD or Web site.

• Graphic Design: Artistic personal historians can create attractive and pleasing visuals to enhance your text and pictures and express your theme. Graphic artists add interest and convey the messages of a manuscript in the form of photos, illustrations, color, design and layout on the page.

• Book Publishing & Printing Services: Most personal historians who provide editing and writing services can also guide the finished manuscript through the publication process to create a beautifully bound hard- or soft-cover book. Their services include helping you select photos and documents; scanning and sizing photos; writing captions, titles and table of contents; and helping you choose page design, graphics, paper, printing process and type of binding. Some members of APH can print and bind your book themselves and some can publish your stories alongside the memoirs of others in an anthology. Whatever their expertise, whatever your budget, their goal is to produce an heirloom that your family will cherish for generations to come.

• Research: Are you trying to remember when certain events occurred in your life, and on what dates? Do you recall what happened to you during a historical event, but find yourself fuzzy on when and where the event actually occurred? From elections to wars to fads to song titles, an APH researcher knows where to look to find the accurate historical information that can jog your memory and complete your story.

• Consulting Services & Project Planning: If you are faced with overflowing boxes of writings, mementos, photographs and letters that you'd like to put together, a personal historian can help you plan, organize and complete your project. Whether you need a coach or a consultant, a guide or a counselor, a personal historian can help.

• Archives & Depository: Those who specialize in the area of preservation might assist a family with the handling of a person's legacy so that it is safely preserved where it will be most widely appreciated. Possible places to archive life stories are: libraries, universities, historical societies and local government archives near where the person lived. There, the documents, tapes or films are safely preserved and can be made available to future researchers.