"Everyone has a story to tell." It seems like a cliche—but it's true. After working as a newspaper reporter for more than eight years, I know that everyone does, indeed, have a story to tell.But even before I started working as a journalist, I knew that life experiences make interesting stories. Consider my parents.
My mother was
daughter of Norwegian immigrants, and her grandfather homesteaded our dairy farm in Wisconsin in late 1800s. My father was son of German and Scottish immigrants. When Dad was a little boy, his parents worked as cooks in a lumber camp in northern Wisconsin. As I was growing up, Mom and Dad would tell stories about their own childhoods. When Mom was a little girl, whole family would sleep in screen porch on hot summer nights. Indians also used to stop at our farm, and gypsies would camp nearby during summer. When Dad was a little boy, he enjoyed spending time at lumber camp kitchen because all of cooks knew that little boys needed special treats during day: a piece of Key Lime pie, a slice of chocolate cake, or a couple of extra-large sugar cookies. When Dad wasn't staying with his parents at lumber camp, he lived with his grandmother, a tiny tough-as-nails German woman who owned a German shepherd named Happy.
Unfortunately, I never wrote down any of those stories, and I never asked Mom and Dad to sit down with a tape recorder and tell those stories. My mother died in 1985 at age of 68, and my father passed away in 1992 at age of 78. The majority of their stories, except for few that I remember, are lost forever. Your family stories do not have to share same fate.
Here are some tips for writing your family stories:
• Decide which person you want to interview first (Grandma or Grandpa, Mom or Dad, Aunt or Uncle), and then tell that person about your plan to write a collection of family stories and ask for permission to conduct an interview.
• Set a formal date and time for interview. This will give your interviewee an opportunity to mentally prepare and to remember various stories that he or she would like to talk about.
• Provide a list of questions several days or weeks before interview. This will also give your interviewee time to remember various stories.
• Focus on a single subject or event in your list of questions—school, holidays (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July), birthdays, seasons (spring, summer, winter, fall)—the list is endless.
• Ask open-ended questions and not "yes or no" questions. "How did you get to school?" is better than "Did you walk to school when you were growing up?"
