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Collecting Memoirs – No Time like the Present!
By Paula Dirkes | March 12, 2010
Greetings!
Have you ever thought ‘I should write down the family stories that (Mom, Dad, Grandpa, Grandma) tells – somebody should preserve them for the next generation!’ But then, you don’t get around to it and time passes. Sometimes some of the storytellers become unable to relate the story any more or even pass away. All those great stories, gone away.
But it doesn’t have to be that way! About 6 or 7 years ago I decided I wanted my Dad to write down some stories I had been hearing snippets of for my whole life. I invited, encouraged, cajoled and finally wrote up a list of open-endedquestions that I had researched on the Internet to help him get some thoughts down on paper. It took about 2 years or so, but Dad finally presented me with about 60, hand-written pages of his memories. (If I had it to do all over again I would have recorded my Dad telling the stories!) Now if you really knew my Dad, you’d know that his business – Rapid Engineering, Inc. – was his passion. Most of his memoirs surrounded the birth and growth of his business with a little bit of his boyhood preceding it and a little bit of our family sprinkled along the way. Mind you, he was in his mid-70s when he was writing it all down, but he remembered a lot of details – especially from his years with Rapid! (The personal details? Not so much. :O) I secretly ran his memoirs past his 3 sisters so they could help me validate the timeline.) I typed it all up and handed out a copy to immediate family.
Dad’s memoirs spawned Mom’s memoirs. Mom’s memoirs spawned my Aunt Mary’s memoirs (my Mom’s oldest sibling). I recorded both Mom and Aunt Mary and also had the interviews transcribed. I gave family members both a printed and recorded version of the interviews.
When Dad died in 2006, I had copies of his memoirs printed with a nice picture of him on the cover. It was offered to everyone who attended the memorial service so they could get to know the man who was their Dad, brother, relative, friend, business associate and co-worker. It was very well-received – and I was SO very happy to have encouraged him to put it all down on paper.
I’ll share some resources about how to collect your own family memoirs in a future post.
Take care of yourself,
Paula
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