apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

These "Between You and Me" Journals are cool too. There is even a Reunion one. http://www.sanddunebooks.com/

Good post, Amy!

Rather than just ask random questions, you're better off to sit with a scrap book or sheaf of old photos, which can spark memories, and then go from there. Then, if you want to combine the audio with scans of the photos, you'll have a decent DVD presentation. Use photos of public events, like V-J day or Kennedy's funeral, too, and get personal memories of historic events.

Asking "yes or no" type questions doesn't yield much, and very open questions can sometimes send older people ( like over 70s) off into a ramble.

Those questions are nice, but before my Grandfather died, I asked him to tell me his oddest stories- the ones that no one else knew. The kind of stories that would make me feel like I knew my Grandpa when HE was young.
Some were stories that I was stunned over- some sad, but they all made me feel like I knew him better.
I heard all about parties they had thrown, his time in WW 2- and why he would never eat rice again, making moonshine, hopping trains as a boy, his elopement with my Grandmother on New Years Eve, the story about how his best friends girlfriend didn't wear underwear (which made it hard for me to look her in the eye at the funeral) and how as a baby they kept him in the stove in a box because he was a preemie and the Dr. told my Great Grandma he would die if he got cold.

Get these stories down, because once their gone, the crazy stories tend to go with them- and you only get the PC versions.

To other folks' excellent suggestions, a few tips derived from teaching teens to interview elders and using what they learn, create monologues performed on stage.

1. Use all the senses to trigger memory. Fresh bread, an orange, a bowl of noodle soup, mud, a wet dog, a fire in the fireplace, hot cocoa--you get the idea. Music/sounds. Textures/holding objects with a past can also trigger memory, often more than photos, though those are great too.

2. Try this: Close your eyes. Imagine yourself at 4 (or 10 or 25 or 42...) standing in a doorway to a room (your childhood kitchen on an ordinary morning, the outhouse on your grandparents' farm in scorching summer or deepest winter, your oldest child's kindergarten classroom on the first day of school, etc.). Ask: what do you see,hear, smell, feel, notice, who is there, what are they saying, doing, how do you feel about it, what happened next?And then? And then?

3. Major events tend to be well documented. Ask also about everyday or simple things: first crush, school dance, favorite teacher, most embarrassing moment, favorite song in high school, ugliest (or loveliest) outfit/hairstyle/shoes, worst job. Use the list of questions in #2 to follow up on these memories. If you hit a dead end, move on. Your subject will open up once you hit upon whatever it is that's most meaningful to them, and usually, you can't predict what that will be.

4. Have fun! You never know what you might learn.

By the time I got a videocamera, both my grandfathers, one grandmother & my mother were dead and my other grandmother was in such ill health that I couldn't bear to film her, knowing that if I did, her great-grandchildren--my nieces & nephews--would forever remember her as nothing more than a frail old lady, which, by then, the certainly looked to be. But that was her body, not her mind, and certainly not her spirit. But how to capture that on tape? And only that?

So one time when I went to see her, I spent a whole day going through the huge trunk of photos in the guest bedroom closet, pulling out for review any that were either important, typical, funny or just plain odd I ended up with several hundred. Then I went through her desk, her closet, her jewelry cases, the kitchen cabinets & any junk drawers in any of her rooms, which there were a lot of--looking for things, anything, that might have an interesting story behind it.

I stacked all the photos in chronolgical order on the coffee table in the living room and got the props laid out: her droopy flapper hat with the fabric roses & speckled bird wings; her silver fox wrap with the heads with hinged jaws that still had their teeth, with which I used to terrorize my little brother, chasing him around the house with the heads snapping at his butt & growling; an unfamilar prototype Pepsi bottle from the 195Os when my uncle was a VP of marketing in NY; her 193Os red plaid Filson jacket she wore on fishing trips to Canada; the toddler's t-shirt with a muddy tire track across the chest, a cringe-inducing souvenir of the time she didn't look before she threw her huge Cadillac into reverse & backed up over my youngest brother who was playing in the driveway (fortunately, all he got was some bruises); the dress she had sewed herself when she was a Campfire girl; The Tostwich machine my grandfather helped invent before they were married; and a ton more stuff besides.

Then I sat her in her comy chair, hooked up the Camcorder to her TV & started sticking photos in front of the lens. Her eyes weren't good enough anymore to see tiny, 70-year-old photos from the cardboard Brownie cameras of her childhood or the badly exposed Polaroids of later years, but blown up on the TV, she could see everything clearly, and what's more, she could remember every invisible detail about them all: who it was ("That's Aunt Edith & the landscape man that everybody always said was my cousin Victor's real father. Just look at that man's ears & then look at Vicctor, and tell me that Victor is a Chapman in anything but name!") where they were ("That was a funny little town that disappeared after they built the new dam & it got flooded by lake vermilion. One time we were at a park there for a picnic day and I lost the opal ring that my boyfriend in elementary school gave me, and I guess told your grandfather that story once too often because one day he came home & handed me a beautiful gold opal ring and said 'Look what I found washed up on shore! It's that damn ring that Barney gave you that you lost and talk about all the time. So next time you see Barney'--he owned the town bakery, and everybody knew him--'you show it to him & tell him that I found it. So I guess now you can stop telling that story.' Except that it wasn't really the same ring, of course, but I pretended that I thought it was. That was your grandfather's his way of telling me he was still a little bit jealous of Barney, even though that was years before, before I even met your grandfather. And it was only because of Barney's looks. When he was little, he was funny looking but by the time your grandfather met him, Barney looked like Warren Harding, who everybody loved because he was so handsome. That was the only reason he got to be president, because once women got the vote, every woman I knew voted for Warren Harding, but all the men hated him").

She also remembered what color all her dresses were. (" I picked that one out myself because it was so pretty but one time I overheard my teacher ask my mother "Why on earth would you dress such a sallow little girl in a terrible color like that?' while I was standing right there in front of them. I thought I would cry right there because even though I didn't know what sallow meant, I knew it must be bad. I pretended I hadn't heard her, but I didn't want to wear that dress anymore, so I wiped some grease from the car on it to spoil it so I wouldn't have to wear it anymore but the finger marks were so plain that my mother could see it wasn't really an accident so she spanked me & said I was a horrid little girl & sent me to bed without supper. I never forgave my teacher for making me so ashamed of the way I looked. And I didn't even know what sallow meant." She told me why her father l had a napkin draped over his head ("No, he wasn't drunk, he was trying to keep from getting a sunburn on his bald head, because your naughty mother had thrown his cap over the side of the boat"). She explianed why my mother was throwing a tantrum and tearing the big bows out of her hair("because I told her that she had to wear boots to play in the snow"); why the tall, flashily dressed stranger in the gazebo at Mudlavia was hiding his face from the camera ("He was probably a gangster from Chicago. They were thick as thieves down there").

Anyway, like Thefarmersdaughter said, I already knew the basics of many of these stories, but the versions that I knew had all been sanitized for my protection, leaving them as smooth and boring as river stones. Now, though, I was hearing once-familiar stories with all their fascinating, messy-- and sometimes, heartbreaking--details still attached, and best of all, they were now preserved for posterity--in my grandmother's own voice--along with the fading images that had triggered her memories in the first place.

My grandmother died before her great-grandchildren were old enough to really know her in person, but thanks to what amounts to a one-woman show stretched out over a course of three hours, they now--just out of college--know her a lot better than I ever did at their age. What's more, having, through pictures, seen grow her from a sad-faced little girl in a weathered old farm house into a confident, laughing 193Os glamour girl--or, at least, the Danville version thereof--and thence into an active & well-loved community presence well into her seventies & eighties, and having heard her laughing as she tells funny family stories in her still-strong voice, they've grown to love her, as well.

So pack up those cameras, everybody, and do this the next time you get the chance. My grandmother lived to be 94, but not everybody gets that chance, and any of us could get run over by a bus--or a rogue Cadillac--at any time, so capture your family's history while you can.