There are many ways to search for your family history. An option that offers a fuller context than records alone is an oral history interview.
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Oral history 101
July 2022 | By Shannan
There are many ways to search for your family history. An option that offers a fuller context than records alone is an oral history interview.
The documentary of a small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan called Winona: A Copper Mining Ghost Town is a great example of this. The interviewer, Michael Loukinen, was able to interview several people about their life in the area and gain a greater insight into the town. Sadly, many of the interviewees passed shortly after the documentary, but without this documentary their stories might not have been preserved.
Another example is Archives.gov, which interviews their staff to record the “work practices, decision-making processes, historical actions, and events.” These interviews can be found here.
Here are a few steps you can take to make the oral history interview a success:
- Decide before the interview what your main focus will be. Is it an event, a time period or a full life story? This will help you keep the interview fairly structured.
- Ask open-ended questions so they can expand their answers beyond a yes and a no.
- There might be pauses while the interviewee is trying to recollect a memory. Please allow for those silences, because this will give them the best chance to tell their full story.
- Ask them to bring photographs to the session or bring photos you have found in your search. This may help jog their memory.
- Before the start of each recording, mention briefly who you are, who they are, the date, the location, and any more information that may be relevant. This will help you keep organized and not lose the context of the recording.
- Transcribe the recording because technology doesn’t last forever. This will give you an opportunity to quickly look back at a particular section instead of trying to find it in an audio/video recording.
resources
Library of Congress’s The American FolkLife Center
Ancestor trouble: a reckoning and a reconciliation
By Maud Newton
Maud Newton’s ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother’s father, who came of age in Texas during the Great Depression, was said to have married thirteen times and been shot by one of his wives. Her mother’s grandfather killed a man with a hay hook and died in an institution.
Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated through Newton’s maternal lines back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. As obsessive in her own way as her parents, Newton researched her genealogy–her grandfather’s marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors’ roles in slavery and genocide–and sought family secrets in her DNA.
But immersed in census archives and cousin matches, she yearned for more profound truths. Her journey took her into genetics, epigenetics, and the debates over intergenerational trauma.
Ancestor Trouble is one writer’s attempt to use genealogy to expose the secrets and contradictions of her own ancestors and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us. —Publisher description.
Genealogy folders
If you are just getting started in your genealogy research, the newly updated genealogy folders are a great resource. They are available at the Adult Services Desk and at the Genealogy/Local History Slatwall in the Genealogy collection area. Included in the folder are blank forms and charts that will help you sort out the information you already have and resource lists and relevant articles to help you further your research goals.
wheeling historical society reopening
The Wheeling Historical Society Museum has officially reopened after 2 years.
The Museum is located in the original Village Hall. Inside the museum, you can find the original switchboard that connected residents (photo shown), a fire department display, the local school’s history display and a restaurant display. It is open April through October from 2-4 pm on Sundays (except holiday weekends) and 9-11 am on Thursdays by appointment only.
The telephone, invented in 1876, did not arrive in Wheeling until December 1901. The board and headset were located in the home of Augusta Schwingle Graf across the street from the Hartmann House Restaurant (Presently Bob Chinn’s Crab House) with only two subscribers: The Village Hall and the Fire Department.
—Description supplied by the Wheeling Historical Society