Do you wish you knew more about the woman who gave birth to you? Here are a dozen interview questions that may enlighten you. (Pictured: my pretty mom.)
So often our questions to our mothers revolve around ourselves. "So, enough about me; what do you think about me?" It's natural to be curious about our own childhood and upbringing from her perspective. But how much do you really know about who she was as a person before you knew her? What are her deepest thoughts and feelings?
Just in time for Mother's Day, here are some interesting questions that may help you get to the heart of the most important woman in your life.
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In this memoir, the place, not the person, is the focus.
Suppose it's not a person's life stories you want to highlight, but stories surrounding a place? Many of us have places that hold special meaning for us--a family farm, a summer home, a city neighborhood or rural mountain ranch. Here are three examples of memoirs in which the place--not the person--is the star.
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What's your best "from here to there?"
Here is a link to a great little article by memoir writing coach Marion Roach Smith. I love her concept of "taking a slice" out of a student's timeline and admonishing them to "just go from here to there."
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"The whole gang." As a caption, it's not very helpful, especially out of context.
Don't you hate it when this happens? You find a great old photo from your grandmother's collection; itchy with anticipation, you flip it over, hoping to find some enlightening runes there. Alas, you see only the cryptic phrase, "Me and Papa in front of the house."
Whaaa? Who is "Me?" Who is "Papa?" What house? Where? When? Sigh. It's almost more frustrating than finding nothing on the back, because there was just that microsecond there when you saw writing and...sigh.
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Jimmie Hughes is a game rancher from Nevada. He was the first mayor of the town of Mesquite and if he ever decides to change careers, he could be a stand-up comedian. His book is full of hilarious (and sometimes touching) stories about his life as a missionary, businessman, and rancher. (My favorite is the tale of the Japanese buffalo hunter. If you ever get to Mesquite, ask him to tell you the story.)
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Five Tips for Handling Digital Photos
This Saturday Tom and I will be presenting at the UGA South Davis Family History Fair in Woods Cross, Utah. (See details here.) One of the classes is entitled "Pixel Wrangling: How to Tame Your Digital Photos Once and For All." If you aren't able to join us, I thought I'd post some helpful past articles on the subject. Because everyone needs a little help when taming this beast.
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This story of a Chicago family is one of the most fascinating books I've had the pleasure to design. Our client had spent years researching the origins of her family, and had a grand vision of what she wanted to accomplish with this book. It is the story of her grandparents: one descended from American slaves, originally from Africa, and the other descended from French royalty. We extracted the genealogical data from the client's Ancestry account and combined it with family photos, supplementing with historical photos to tell the story not just of this family, but of the cultures surrounding her family through the ages.
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Writing about your life is good for you.
I can attest from my own experience that life story writing can be a powerfully self-affirming journey. Looking at an overview of your life as a whole gives you a unique perspective. For me, I was able to make connections between seemingly disparate events that I hadn't noticed until I started to write about them. Seeing those connections, some things that had confused me for years suddenly started to make sense.
A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association established a link between writing about stressful experiences and improved health. The co-author of the study, Joshua M. Smyth, explains, “It actually has little to do with raw catharsis, which, I think, is what people assume.” Rather, the health benefits were a result of cognitive restructuring, or learning to see problems in a new way
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Share stories from your childhood with your grandchildren in a custom picture book.
This week we wanted to show you a pair of darling children's picture books. Sharon and Gordon Spencer wanted to give their grandchildren an idea of what their childhoods were like. They gathered a few childhood photos and took pictures of some favorite dolls and toys that they had treasured for decades. Then they wrote a narrative in very short bits for tiny readers, and we supplemented the narrative with some stock photos and Photoshop composites. These little books were so much fun to create! They gave them to their grandchildren for Christmas: "Grandma's Dolls" and "When Grandpa was a Boy."
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Curating and Digitizing Your Family HIstory Assets
My mom, Joyce Taylor is 88 years old. About a year and a half ago she moved out of her home of 20+ years into an assisted living home. Many of you may be contemplating a similar move or helping a parent or grandparent make this decision.
Any major move, especially if you're downsizing, brings up the question: what do you do with all your stuff? Does it go with you, or go someplace else? (Or does it just get trashed?) This question gets even more thorny when it concerns precious family heirlooms: boxes of photos, documents, scrapbooks, yearbooks, slides, memorabilia, newspaper clippings, letters, and on and on.
Read moreHow do you get from dry genealogy facts to a compelling story? This presentation from RootsTech 2020 will hopefully inspire you as well as give you tools to write your ancestors’ stories. (Audio with slides) Join me on a fascinating journey as I find one of my ancestors and write her story.
We are so excited to be back at RootsTech live this year! Come by and see the Pictures and Stories booth (#1609) and see some of the many new books we’ve helped our clients create. Alison is giving two in-person classes: The Seven Deadly Sins of Building a Digital Archive, and Making a Genealogy Story Book. Hope to see you there!