Recording Your Family History

While this book is dated 1987, and references to technology are a bit out of date, this book is a gem. I use it as a motivator to encourage me in the process of doing interviews, and preserving family history. He calls it a "Life History Interview" and gives you more examples of questions than you would ever want to use. But his questions to use, and his approach to the process, sensitivity to the narators aversion to the technology, are right on. This book will spark your own insights and get you moving to preserve your own histories. The title of an earlier edition was "Talking Your Roots".

The book is getting a little dated as time passes, but it still has more sample questions to help you get you family members talking than you will ever use. It's great because it has samples for different periods in ones life and it has questions for different periods in history.

William Fletcher sets the standard for instructions on doing oral histories. His advice on "how to" is concise and laced with experience. The thing that sets him apart from other writers is his exhaustive list of questions. The good-idea-fairy helped him build nearly 300 pages of great questions! It's impossible to ask them all but they give great lead to conducting numerous interviews to really cover your topic. I've used this book with my grandmother and have uncovered so many things she never told anyone about. I recently purchased the 1989 copy of this book and have the 1983 version at home (somewhere, that's why I needed another copy). There is also a 1986 version. All three are very similar and I don't really notice the differences other than in his explanations of equipment and use of video. Any of them would be a great purchase for use in guiding your questions.

If you would like to record a family member's story or interview someone, this books goes through the stages of a life logically and provides the questions to each stage. eg childhood, youth etc. I use the questions as a base and change them to my needs. It has provided excellent starting point. It even has a special section for different ethnicty/religion ie Jewish section, African American questions. Fanatastic book!!!!