Family Histories – Preserving the Voice of the Past

“Christmas was THE THING! I don’t think anyone raised in that era will forget Christmas Eve. The excitement of getting ready – I can close my eyes – ‘course we always had snow, and the crunching while we walked to church and the sparkle in the snow – just that excitement! I don’t think a child could forget that…and each one would get a little ‘toot’ [goodie bag] with peanuts, an orange and a few hard candy…”

Have you ever been to a family gathering and overheard a great aunt, uncle, or grandparent start talking about when they were young? Did you ever think, “Someone should be recording this”?

If you are interested in family history and preserving some record of the past to pass on, interviews are a fun way to start. Photo albums, genealogy books, and family records are great, but there is nothing like hearing the stories from people who have actually experienced the things we see and read about in those historical records. Interviews do not take a lot of time or preparation and even if you do nothing but record and copy a few cassette tapes you will have preserved something wonderful for future generations to enjoy. The sooner you start the more history you will be able to capture.

In this article, I hope to present you with a few helpful tips on how to prepare for an interview, how to conduct the actual interview, and what to do with the information you gather.

To prepare for an interview you need to gather some basic equipment. You should get yourself a small tape recorder, plenty of long-playing (90 minutes minimum) blank tapes, and spare batteries. Do not get a recorder that is voice-activated as the tapes will come out choppy and the pauses in conversations often reflect a person’s emotional response to a memory. For my first interviews, I had one of those big boom box stereos that was very awkward and distracting. It took up half a good-sized kitchen table and made more noise than a running air conditioner. I quickly learned what a distraction that was!

Another great option is the digital recorder. These are very small and the sound quality is superb, but they are expensive. You could use a video camera, but be aware that some people are very uncomfortable with being video taped. You should also have paper and pen, people willing to be interviewed, and a list of questions to prompt their stories.

Decide who you want to interview and draft your questions based on what you already know about them. Start with a few warm-up questions to help you get comfortable with each other. Ask their name, their parents names, where they were born, etc. Then move into open-ended questions that require more than a yes or no response. I like to ask questions such as: What do you remember about your grandparents? There may be no one else on the planet that remembers them. What was Christmas like when you were a child?

Ask about the gifts, traditional foods, programs, and decorations. What kind of values did your parents teach you? What was your wedding like? What was it like on the ship when you came to Canada? These sorts of questions usually get some wonderful stories.

You might also ask about the first car their dad bought, their childhood home, and how their family made a living. This is always interesting. People will say that their dad was a farmer, blacksmith, teacher, or such, but when asked what their mother did they are likely to respond “Oh, she didn’t work.” Ask what their mothers did for the family and you will hear something like “Well, she baked bread every day, cooked, cleaned, did laundry, grew a garden, canned enough fruit and vegetables for a family of 12 to last the year, raised turkeys for Eaton’s, sold butter to the local grocer, traded eggs for apples with neighbours, sewed all our clothes, and supervised the children taking care of the farm animals.” Sounds like work to me!

Many people in past generations became experts in their fields without university or even high school education. If you want to know about their education, find out who taught them to farm or ask if they had special training to do their line of work. For example, my father-in-law, in his early twenties, learned to build carpenter’s saw horses from the wife of a contractor. She did not like the big, heavy ones he had built so she showed him the “right way” to do it.

After you have gathered your recorder or video camera, and a list of guiding questions, contact the elder members of your family or their friends and arrange to meet.

You really want to focus on the interview so it might work best if you do not go for a meal or take extra people with you. When you get to their home, find a comfortable place at the table or on the sofa and set up your interview space. Explain why you are recording the interview and that you appreciate their taking the time with you. Turn on your equipment and let it run – try not to fuss with it.

Practice good listening skills during the interview – make eye contact, nod, smile, and otherwise quietly encourage them to keep talking. Let the conversation flow naturally, and try not to interrupt. When I listen to my old tapes, I cringe at how often I stopped a good story by saying something when they were mid-sentence. If you think of something to ask them, just write a word or two on your paper and carry on listening. If you start writing furiously while they are talking, they will think that they have answered your question and will stop talking. Eventually you will learn to put down the pen and just listen! You may want to do more than one interview per person. They will likely ponder your questions and have more memories to share the next time.

A bit more advice – do not go seeking the “ultimate truth” as this does not exist. Each person remembers the past in a very unique way, and memories are filtered through years of experiences and reflection. If you ask four people about the same event, you will get four different perspectives. This is a good thing - by hearing them all you get a richer story. And if Uncle Jacob says an event happened in 1925 and Aunt Susanne says it happened in 1923 it probably does not matter. What is important is what they remember about the event.

Also, men and women structure the past differently. Generally, women will remember events by relating it to family life. “I was baking Johnnie’s 1st birthday cake when we heard about the war on the radio.” or “Mom had washed curtains the day before she died and they were still draped over chairs waiting to be hung the next day.”

Men, on the other hand, will relate memories to numbers, whether money, miles, or hours and will often connect memories to their work. “That was the year we built old man Friesen’s house. He paid us 10 cents an hour.” or “I remember walking 5 miles to work every day.”

Once you have the tapes, have them copied and share them with siblings, cousins, or whoever is interested. This is where digital recording is great – you can quickly send it via email. Then you can be creative and find ways to put the interviews to good use. Perhaps enlist a web page whiz to set up a family history web. Imagine hearing grandma’s voice describing her wedding while looking at photos of that special day.

I heard some great stories during interviews I did for a history course – a child’s memories of enjoying her first cup of tea with her father; an 11-year-old’s stay in a TB sanatorium in far off Ninette; a brother dying of malaria as a baby and another while serving in WWII; a 5-year-old traveling with his family by ship to Canada leaving behind friends and home; wrapping up in a “peltzdakker” (fur blanket) for the horse and sleigh trip to Grandma’s house; Eaton’s beauty dolls; and Christmas goodie bags.

The people who remember these things will eventually be gone. Your children and grandchildren do not know a world without cell phones, voicemail, and computers. Your grandparents and great grandparents grew up in a world without electricity, telephones, or “indoor plumbing.” The contrast is incredible!

The wonderful thing about doing interviews is that you do not need to be a great writer, orator, photographer, or scrapbooker. You just need to listen and let them tell you what it was like.