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14 Best RootsTech sessions for family storytellers in 2022
Here are my top picks for RootsTech 2022 sessions teaching about family storytelling and photo legacy. They’re all free, and you've got a year to watch!
Why waste time browsing through hundreds of session descriptions? If you’re interested in learning about preserving and sharing family stories and photos at RootsTech 2022, then look no further and bookmark this page—I’ve curated the best options for family story keepers below.
Again this year, RootsTech, the largest family history conference in the world, will be held virtually—and free of charge. That means there is a wealth of stuff you can access for free! But trust me when I say diving into the menu of seminars and finding exactly what you want can be challenging.
There are 22 family history topics covered in the RootsTech array of class sessions and keynotes in 2022, from technology to travel, from historical records to DNA. While of course all kinds of genealogy topics may be of interest to you, I am honing in on the best that’s on offer on the topic of storytelling.
Of the hundreds (!!) of results that RootsTech dishes out on the storytelling track, here are my favorites—and those I think you may most benefit from.
Bookmark this page and come back to those that interest you when you have time—for while the conference officially runs from March 3-5, most of the content will be available on the website for a full year.
RootsTech 2022 sessions on family storytelling and sharing
Telling Your Stories & Making Connections
1 - Workshop: Start Telling Your Own and Family Stories
“Writing about your memories doesn't have to be an arduous task. In this workshop, we'll complete fun brainstorming exercises to develop family story ideas. Because stories beget stories, we'll also have opportunities to exchange ideas.” Sounds like a session that will be both informative and participatory—that’s my kind of class.
Presenter: Laura Hedgecock is president GeneaBloggers and author of Memories of Me: A Complete Guide to Telling and Sharing the Stories of Your Life.
2 - Stories for Your Family History: How to Tell a Good Family Story
“Learn family storytelling tips that will help others enjoy your stories as much as you do,” describes the course description. Remember: Your own personal narrative is part of your ongoing family history, so it’s important to document your stories for the next generation—hopefully this session will get you started!
Presenter: Sunny J. Morton, author of Story of My Life: A Workbook for Preserving Your Legacy.
3 - Easy Family History Video Stories
If you’re like me and the idea of shooting and editing a video intimidates you, then this course looks like it’s for us. The description promises to cover a storyboarding technique to help with planning as well as simple tools for combining photos, audio, video clips, and music. “This class will use a case study of creating a video story from an inherited World War I wallet. It was created with post cards, voice narration, and other memorabilia.”
Presenter: Rhonda Gaye Lauritzen is a professional biographer and founder of Evalogue.Life.
4 - Create a Family History WordPress Blog
“Blogging is a great way to share family history, family stories, photographs, documents, and more. This short video teaches you how to set up a WordPress blog, how to invite family members to join, how to upload content, and how to make the site private,” reads the session description. Salina will also provide examples of other family history sites for inspiration.
Presenter: Rhonda Chadwick is author of Secrets from the Stacks and teaches family historians and genealogists how to create a family archive for long-term preservation.
Sharing Difficult Stories
5 - Researching and Writing About Skeletons in the Family History Closet
“We all have them: ancestor stories that tend to be hushed up: illegitimate children, desertion, abuse, mental illness, etc. How do we discover the facts and what do we do when our family history research uncovers something unexpected? Recording these kinds of details can be difficult. We’ll explore ways to tell our ancestor’s story with integrity and kindness.”
Presenter: Diana Elder is a professional genealogist, author of Research Like a Pro: A Genealogist’s Guide, cohost of the Research Like a Pro Genealogy Podcast.
6 - Handling Sensitive Subjects in Family Storytelling and Autobiography
“Writing life stories containing adversity can heal and inspire, but we must navigate the danger zones carefully. These include handling different versions of the truth, unreliable memories, abuse, difficult family history, and unflattering details. Learn how to process your story in a safe environment versus when to share with others. This class will provide practical guidance so you will know how to approach sticky questions. Guidance includes: empathy, a mindset of grappling, self-care, and a focus on transformation. These tools can turn the hardest topics in your personal story or family history into lessons of growth. If you approach writing your memoir, life story, autobiography, or family history with care, your words can be a source of strength and healing. The reward is greater insight and stories that will inspire others.”
Presenter: Rhonda Gaye Lauritzen is a professional biographer and founder of Evalogue.Life.
7 - How to Handle Sensitive Topics in Family History
“This presentation examines the ways in which we present our family stories and considers those ancestors whose lives we may deliberately or unintentionally be misrepresenting and why. It discusses why it is important to present a rounded portrait of our families, the good, the bad, the ugly and the marginalized. The potential impact of telling unbalanced stories on current family members will be considered. There will also be suggestions for handling difficult material in a sensitive manner.” The syllabus includes notations on slavery, disability, mental illness, prostitution, and criminals.
Presenter: Janet Few is a community and family historian and lecturer.
Evaluating Family Stories
8 - Is Your Family Folklore Fact or Fiction?
“This presentation helps people understand, it is okay to find out if their family folklore is true.”Using two personal case studies, Pratt shows how to search for clues, where to find information, and how to discreetly share your findings with family.
Presenter: Virginia M. Pratt currently works as a Wiki content project coordinator for FamilySearch.
RootsTech 2022 Sessions on Your Family Photo Legacy
managing your photo archive
9 - Best Foot Forward: Preserving Ancestors' Photos
“Tracking down our ancestors’ photos, documents, and stories can be a treasure hunt with huge rewards,” reads the description for this two-part course from presenters Maureen Taylor and Nancy Lora Desmond. “The images and details we create during our lifetime will be equally impactful to generations down the road.”
In part one, they focus on what materials to digitize, how to properly handle physical artifacts such as photos and documents, options and tips for digitizing materials, smart ways to name files, and how/where to store the materials to ensure long-term preservation. Part two delves into options and tips for storing digitized files, best practices for structuring folders, how to tag details as portable metadata, and why that matters.
This session is suitable for anyone who wants to tackle a DIY family album project or sort and preserve their photo library for the next generation; syllabus indicates course is geared toward beginners.
Presenters: Maureen Taylor, a.k.a. The Photo Detective, is a family historian who focuses on photographs, digital albums, and photo restoration platforms. Nancy Desmond is chief memory officer and co-founder of MemoryWeb, a photo organizing site that makes capturing metadata easy for family historians.
RootsTech Sessions 2022 introducing you to apps and technologies to help preserve your family history stories
10 - Food Heritage
Want to preserve your family’s food stories? Learn about Fareloom, an app designed to help you engage, gather, share, and preserving your own recipes, food stories, and traditions.
11 - Oral History Markers
Want to add audio stories to your family photo books? Check out Audiostickers—their QR codes connect to cloud storage for capturing your oral stories.
12 - Hard Drives
Do you store your digital photos, genealogy documents, and other family history files on an external hard drive? Tech guru Andy Klein describes failure rates of hard drives and introduces cloud storage as an option.
13 - Family Heirlooms
Interested in preserving the stories behind your favorite keepsakes and family heirlooms? Check out GenerationStory, a free app designed especially for archiving such stories.
14 - Family Newsletter
Ever considered creating a family newsletter? Get inspired by presenter Kylie Zhong, who talks about her daughters’ experience interviewing relatives and sharing their stories in a monthly newsletter.
15 - Photographing Journals
ShotBox, a mini portable lightbox photo studio, offers up a tutorial on photographing journals and other bound materials such as books and photo albums.
Honorable mentions
While I have chosen to highlight the sessions above—for their in-depth content and quality presenters—there were a number of shorter or duplicative sessions that may still be of interesest that I wanted to put forth. So here are honorable mentions in many of the family history categories we’ve already covered (who knows, perhaps you’ll find sessions in here that are treasures to you!):
Storytelling
Let Me Tell You a Story: Helping Children Make Connections by presenter Susan H. Porter.
Write Your Family Stories (in 30 Minutes or Less) by presenter Brenda Hudson, a journal facilitator and author of Story by Story: 15 Projects to Write Your Family Legacy
How to Draw Closer to Our Ancestors by presenter Cameron Briggs.
Using Family Stories, Pictures and Keepsakes to Connect Us to Our Ancestors by presenter H. Wallace Goddard.
Documenting an Ancestor by presenter Seema Kenney, an experienced software instructor and a professional genealogist.
Roots for Kids: Sharing Family Stories by presenter Susan Provost Beller, a teacher and author of history books for children.
Creative Journaling for Busy Parents by presenter Kandis Lake, a mom of three and a hobbyist family historian.
Preserve your Legacy in a Simple Word Document Memory Book by presenter Rhonda Chadwick, author of Secrets from the Stacks.
Capturing the Stories of our Families and Communities: A Youth Project by presenter Byron Holdiman, a genealogy librarian and teacher.
Evaluating Family Stories
Why Your Story Matters by presenter Devin Ashby, a global outreach manager for FamilySearch.
Photo Legacy
From a Box in the Closet to a Treasured Family Heirloom (two-parts) by presenter Sara Cochran, a full-time professional genealogist with over twenty-five years of research experience.
Organizing Your Photo Legacy by presenter Cathi Nelson, founder of the professional organization The Photo Managers.
Liven Up Ancestors’ Histories with a Variety of Photos to Engage All Generations by presenter Jean Naisbitt
Organized to Capture Stories: Photos as Triggers for Family Storytelling by presenters from Ponga, photo organization software often used to capture research, crowdsource stories, and curate family legacies.
Family Photographs and a Sense of Belonging by presenter Janet Few, a family and community historian and lecturer.
Remember, RootsTech 2022 is free and virtual—all you need to do is register to gain access to all the great sessions above and many more in so many additional genealogy categories. Happy learning!
Storytelling hack: Talk, don’t write.
Do you want to write your memoir but don't consider yourself a writer? Don't worry, there's another—easier—way to preserve them. Speak your life stories aloud.
Telling your stories out loud and recording them is a great option if you want to preserve your personal history but don’t feel comfortable writing.
Have you thought about writing your life story—but then refrained because you don’t think you’re a good enough writer?
I’ve got three important things to say to you:
You are good enough.
Sure, you may want to take a virtual writing course or hire a memoir coach to help you improve your writing, or read one of these valuable books with life writing guidance. But know this: You don’t have to. You don’t need to strive to write a bestseller; rather, focus on reflecting back on your experiences, finding the lessons, the love, the joy, and the hardships, and sharing them with those you love. Whatever you write will be more than good enough—for you (you do know that writing your memoir is beneficial for YOU, right?), and for any family members you would like to leave your stories to. So write on—please!
Don’t change your voice.
Your memoir should sound like you: the way you talk, the way you weave a tale. It should reflect your values and your experiences. “There’s power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice,” Michelle Obama has written. “And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others.” So don’t focus on sounding writerly or clever, and don’t edit out those colloquial phrases you say often. Focus instead on being authentic and truthful, and allowing yourself to be vulnerable as you tell your stories.
Drop your pen and pick up a recorder.
The blank page before you is just a vehicle. If you are paralyzed by the thought of writing your life stories, drop your pen (or step away from your keyboard) and instead begin recording your stories out loud. All you need is the voice recorder app on your smart phone or a digital recorder, a quiet space, and some time. I recommend either brainstorming a list of memories or creating a life timeline beforehand, so you can reference these and feel inspired to tell your tales. Then hit “record” and start talking. Maybe do this once a week, or every morning (setting some kind of regular schedule will help you finish one day!). Down the road you can transcribe these oral histories and maybe edit them into something more cohesive and inspiring. But for now all you need to do is (a) get started and (b) keep talking!
“Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family,” Terry Tempest Williams says. “Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility…. Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.”
Your story, moreover, is a gift.
I’m sure you’ve heard the expression “done is better than perfect,” and oh how applicable that is here! Whether you write your stories or speak into a recorder, the end result will be a gift to your family. One day in the future, one of your descendants will read your words and be grateful you took the time to preserve them. How powerful is that?
Life Story Links: February 14, 2022
This week's curated reading list for memory-keepers, family historians, and memoirists includes first-person stories, preservation tips, and recent reviews.
“Revealing oneself is an act of radical generosity: Letting oneself be seen allows others to do the same. And this vulnerability creates connection; this connection creates community.”
—Robin MacArthur
Vintage Valentine’s Day postcard depicting a swallow carrying a love note.
Stories Hold Power
CONNECTING PAST AND FUTURE
“The revelations about my father shook my sense of my own life’s trajectory to its foundations. I felt drawn into a reconsideration of where I came from and how I got to where I am now.” William Damon on learning about the father he never knew, plus the undeniable value of life review.
RELEVANCE CORRELATES TO MEANING
“When we hear stories from family members about their experiences, we usually ruminate longest over the ones that feel the most familiar to us.” Family stories have enduring value. Some you share now may not be relevant enough for your kids to care. But one day they will see themselves in your stories.
In the News
HISTORY UNDERFOOT
Before NYC’s Central Park came to be, Seneca Village was home to the largest number of African American property owners in New York before the Civil War. History of those who lived there is currently being researched and uncovered. “All we can do is honor the past,” says one descendant. “Nothing covered can ever get healed.”
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS TO INSPIRE
Timed to The New Yorker’s ninety-seventh anniversary, the magazine has curated an eclectic selection of profiles from their archive, including a 1929 portrait of Edith Wharton, a 2007 profile of innovative artist Kara Walker, and a 1996 exploration of Anatole Broyard’s choice to deny his true identity. This one’s worth bookmarking and coming back to frequently.
AFRICATOWN DOCUMENTARY
Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson discovered during a 2017 episode of PBS's Finding Your Roots that his ancestors were among those smuggled into the U.S. on the Clotilda in 1860. He has since produced a film, now screening at Sundance, called Descendant, that tells the story of descendants of the last known slave ship to America.
Experts with Memory-Keeping Tips
READY, SET, ACTION!
“There’s a lot to keep track of when filming a loved one, but each step adds an important layer toward creating a memory that ensures your loved one looks good, sounds good, and feels comfortable telling their incredible stories.” Tips from Austin–based Sacred Stories for capturing your family stories on film.
PRESERVATION TIPS
“I started asking questions during our monthly family Zoom calls and it opened Pandora’s box.” African American museum experts and family historians offer their best advice for preserving memories for future generations.
FROM PRINT TO PIXELS
Mali Bain, a custom publisher located in British Columbia, has put together a thorough list of options for digitizing family photos, with notes on how to choose which is right for your own project.
In Their Own Voice
BIRTHDAY TELEGRAMS, POEMS, PHOTOS
A major collection of James Joyce documents and books has been donated to the University of Reading. “Together with a lot of the personal items and the letters that he wrote to [his son] Stephen, it really shows Joyce as a family man, not just this literary giant. A lot of these items show him at his most human.”
LISTENING TO MLK
As part of the Saving Stories series, Doug Boyd, director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History in the UK Libraries, highlights an extraordinary 1964 interview between Kentucky author Robert Penn Warren and Martin Luther King, Jr. at the height of his influence.
WORDS FROM A GRIEVING FATHER
“I’ve got to write and tell somebody about some stuff and, like I long ago told Larry, you’re the best backboard I know. So indulge me a little; I am but hurt.” After his son died in a tragic accident, Ken Kesey wrote this letter recounting the last day of his child’s life.
Reflecting Back: Words on Paper
THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ESSAY
“Perhaps nothing has so shaped the contemporary practice of essay writing as the rise of the personal essay.” Jackson Arn on “why personal essays have moved from the corner of the party to the center,” for better or for worse.
WORLD OF THE BOOK 2022
Not all stories live in books, of course, but books were indeed the first means of recording our histories, and the State Library of Victoria in Australia has launched an exhibition tracing the book’s journey through space and time. Browse the digital exhibit, and watch below as a senior librarian discusses how the evolution of the book has revolutionized the way we take in information and ideas:
From Whence Stories Emerge
YOUR SENTIMENTAL STUFF
“Letting go of an item can feel like letting go of a memory, and the tension between wanting to own fewer things and wanting to hold onto memories can be paralyzing.” Cat Saunders on how to declutter sentimental items.
IN PICTURES
“The family album is almost a kind of folk art. It was a way to make order: to understand ourselves, our families and our communities.” Filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris on discovering shared humanity through family photos.
“FOOD HAS ALWAYS BEEN ITS OWN KIND OF MEMORY”
“Food is sustenance, culture, environment, economics and politics. Food will always be at the heart of people’s stories.” Charmaine Wilkerson, author of the novel Black Cake, on the unbreakable connection between our stories and the things we eat.
THE LETTERS PROJECT
After her mother died, Eleanor Reissa made a discovery at the back of her mother’s lingerie drawer: 56 letters handwritten in German by her father in 1949—only four years after Auschwitz—to her mother, also a refugee, already living in the U.S. Thirty years later, with her father’s letters as her guide, Reissa went on a journey into the past. Here she is in conversation about the memoir that resulted:
...and a Few More Links
A new free online archive offers an unprecedented look into Marcel Duchamp’s life and work.
Do we need to “radically rethink the Library of Congress classification” system?
Read an excerpt from The Grieving Brain by Mary-Frances O’Connor
Auschwitz survivor Mel Mermelstein, who fought Holocaust deniers, dies.
“That night was unquestionably the worst I’ve experienced during my 100 years on this earth.”
Vintage Valentines: Collecting love letters from our culture’s past
Memoirist Juanita E. Mantz on writing about home
Tips for capturing the emotions of your subjects through photography
A new biography of V.C. Andrews, author of the 1979 bestseller Flowers in the Attic
How an ancient piece of jewelry changed our concept of Viking history
Short Takes
Today: “I don’t care.” Tomorrow: “That was life-changing.”
Family stories have enduring value. Some you share now may not be relevant enough for your kids to care. But one day they will see themselves in your stories.
Your granddaughter is too young to really listen to or understand some of your stories right now—but one day she may need to hear them, to be nourished by the lessons and comforted by your shared experiences.
“I never knew any of this stuff about you, Mom,” the daughter of one of my clients said after reading her life story book.
From a family member of another client: “When I lost my job this year during the pandemic, I had a niggling sensation that my grandmother had gone through something similar. Then I remembered: I read about her experience in her book.”
“When we hear stories from family members about their experiences, we usually ruminate longest over the ones that feel the most familiar to us.”
When we hear stories from family members about their experiences, we usually ruminate longest over the ones that feel the most familiar to us.
If I am engaged to be married, perhaps I linger over my mom’s retelling of how she and my dad met. If I’ve just had a child myself, I’ll undoubtedly read with great interest the tales of their experiences parenting me and my siblings.
Some stories will feel foreign upon first reading. Your grandmother describing life in Brooklyn during the Depression; your grandfather recalling what if felt like to return from the Great War and no longer have a purpose. Even your parent losing a job when they least expected it—that is, until that story becomes relevant to your own experience, too.
Family stories have enduring value
Life transitions are some of the strongest fodder for memoir and personal history specifically because they bring about change—and change stirs all kinds of feelings and fears.
Transitions are the plot twists in our lives. And when they are unexpected, and they are happening to us right now, we feel unmoored.
But imagine if we had access to a story about the time our dad went through something almost exactly the same. He, too, felt unmoored. He, too, had no way of knowing how this transition in his life would play out.
Then 30 years later, he reflected about that time—his experiences, his feelings, the lessons he may have learned—and his stories made their way into a book. A book that now sits on a bookshelf in your living room.
While you may have flipped through that book a dozen times before, you want to reread it now. You crave remembering how his story turned out. It has a newfound relevance for you, and as such, it means so much more to encounter it at this time in your life.
“Transitions are the plot twists in our lives. And when they are unexpected, and they are happening to us right now, we feel unmoored.”
“In former times, knowledge was passed down from father to son and from grandparents to grandchildren,” Gianluigi Quentin has written. “Today, the focus is so concentrated on the future that there is a disregard for many of the important lessons of the past. This is why it is important that we elders write our memoirs—so that younger generations can learn from our experiences.”
Indeed, this is also why some stories will matter more in 10 years than they seem to right now: because our loved ones encounter them when they need them.
The stories of our modern lives—of transitions and ups and downs—“should tell us that the best way to respond to a period of personal upheaval—the close of one story, the end of one dream—is to push through the darkness, paddle through the torrents, persevere through the woods,” Bruce Feiler writes. “And to know: We’re not alone.”
What better way to let your descendants know they are not alone than to preserve your stories for them to learn from?
Life Story Links: February 1, 2022
Stories about journaling, memoir writing, and preserving individual accounts of WWII—they're all in this week's curated reading list for personal historians.
“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.”
—Anaïs Nin
"Narihira’s journey east," a 1770 book illustration, courtesy of Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Writing Our Lives
GETTING TO THE FINISH LINE
For anyone stuck in the middle of a life story project—or hesitating to even begin because finishing seems like a pipe dream—setting a deadline can be a game-changer.
DAILY DIARY
Martha McPhee carries a journal with her, she says, “because it helps me track the uncharted territory of the present moment. In this act of gathering—scrawls about things noticed on the way to a store, the playbill for my son’s brief acting career, glue-sticked to the page—I’m forced to slow down and tend to the parts that evoke a whole. Sometimes they plant the seed for an idea that I might write about later on.”
THE AUDACITY OF BEING SEEN
“Revealing oneself is an act of radical generosity: Letting oneself be seen allows others to do so the same. And this vulnerability creates connection; this connection creates community.” Robin MacArthur on the courage to write.
Memories Flow from Varied Places
MUSIC THAT MEANT THE MOST TO HIM
“When BBC correspondent Dan Johnson posted on Twitter shortly before Christmas that he had finished editing a project capturing the voice of his late father Graeme, he was surprised by the reaction. It made him consider the importance of preserving the memories of loved ones.”
BOOKS THAT LINED HER SHELVES
Books from the home library shelves of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, artifacts that reflect aspects of her life from student to U.S. Supreme Court justice, are up for auction, including her annotated edition of the 1957–58 Harvard Law Review (how I would love to see that marginalia) to a signed copy of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
DIARY DISCOVERIES
Sally MacNamara has found universal feelings that span generations in the thousands of diaries she has read. Listen in as she shares words from a few handpicked favorites (they’re truly moving) and talks of how her great-grandmother’s handwritten journal helped her navigate grief after her husband’s death.
If you enjoyed Sally’s TedX Talk, you may also be interested in checking out her podcast Diary Discoveries.
War Stories
WWII GENERATION PASSING ON
“The kids and grandkids of the greatest generation have stories to tell. It's up to us to tell them to our kids and for our kids to tell them to theirs. Haul out the family archives. The pictures and the Purple Hearts and the letters from the war front. And the home front.”
VOICES OF THE HOLOCAUST
Timed to International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2022, The National WWII Museum in New Orleans has curated a collection of some of their most notable programs on the Holocaust, including numerous first person testimonies.
MORE FROM THE NATIONAL WWII MUSEUM
Browse the museum’s compelling digital collections of photographs and oral histories that tell stories of the war through the people who were there. The entries marked “Curator’s Choice,” like this one about a soldier’s letter home, are among my favorites.
...and a Few More Links
Julia Cameron on the enduring power of The Artist’s Way and morning pages
Emma Knight finds comfort in the diaries of Virginia Woolf.
The many meanings of family estrangement for female immigrants
Short Takes
The simple reason your life story project never gets finished
Got a life story writing project that you've wanted to do for a long time that's just not getting done? How setting a deadline may be the key to completion.
Setting a deadline for your life story writing project will help you get it done rather than languishing on your to do list.
You’ve thought about getting your stories down on paper for years. You’ve made a list of pivotal moments throughout your life that you’d like to write about. Maybe you’ve gone through your photo collection and set aside some favorite pictures to use as part of your storytelling. Perhaps you’ve even written the first few chapters.
And yet, that journal you bought especially for this life story project sits neglected on your nightstand. Why?
“I seem to have lost my passion for it.”
“I don’t always know what to write about on any given day, so I end up staring at a blank page before abandoning it for Netflix.”
“I thought I’d have the time, but I really don’t.”
“It seems like too big an undertaking—I can’t imagine ever finishing.”
You know what these are, don’t you? They’re not real reasons—not legitimate ones that should stop you from completing your family history or legacy project, anyway. They’re symptoms of the real problem.
So, what’s the real problem? You don’t have a deadline (or a plan).
Don’t believe me that setting a deadline will spur you into action and get you on the road to completion? Research backs me up (as does two decades of personal experience as a managing editor at monthly magazines!).
How to set a realistic deadline for your life story project
Having a deadline forces you to think about the steps it will take to complete your goal. So, to meet that goal:
Make a broad-strokes plan.
Define your finished project—is it a book with photos, a journal covering a specific time period, or an oral history that delves into pivotal moments in your life? Be specific, so you know exactly what you are working towards.
Set mini-goals.
If you know you want to write only about your years in the military, for example, create a list of steps to get you there (make a timeline; denote key themes and stories you want to cover; gather photos and other mementos to use as memory prompts; write one story per week).
Create a schedule that works for you.
Maybe it’s writing one story per week, like in the example above. Or maybe it’s more aggressive: Write for one hour every morning. Don’t be so liberal that your project promises to take all year. As Tim Ferriss describes in his bestselling book The 4-Hour Workweek, “If I give you a week to complete the same task, it's six days of making a mountain out of a molehill. If I give you two months, God forbid, it becomes a mental monster. The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.”
Understand your lifestyle and your ideal work times (are you energetic after your morning cup of coffee, or wonderfully reflective and calm enough to write on Sundays after church, for instance?) and designate the best times for YOU to devote to this project. By being thoughtful about when you’ll be most productive—and eager—to tackle your life stories, you are setting yourself up for success.
Use the info gathered above to write down a schedule.
This may seem like a lot of work just to come up with a deadline for your life story book, but you’re not going for any deadline, but a reasonable, achievable one. So, if you jotted down that you want to write about 12 pivotal moments from your life, and you’ve decided to write on Sunday mornings, block out 12 weeks’ worth of Sundays to write. What date does that bring you to? WRITE THIS DOWN on a calendar or create a bulleted list of target dates and tasks to complete. Writing it down helps it become real for you—and gives you a way to hold yourself accountable.
How to finish your life story book by your deadline
Without having a task master checking in on you periodically, it can still be challenging to finish the life story project you started, even with a deadline. Keep these things in mind to help you stay on track:
Consider asking a friend or family member to help hold you accountable.
Tell someone you love and trust about your life story project—and ask them to follow up with occasional check-ins. Declaring your goal out loud holds great power on its own; adding someone else into the mix, well, adds a little external pressure, too!
Let go of perfectionism.
“Make meeting the big deadline—not achieving perfection—the ultimate goal. Voilà. You’re making no guarantees of quality, but perhaps your work can be improved later,” Phyllis Korkki writes in this piece in the New York Times celebrating the power of deadlines.
And remember: You don’t have to do everything you want as part of this one project! Maybe your FIRST project—complete with plan and deadline—is to get your stories down. Then, when you’ve got the satisfaction of completing that project (congratulations!!), you set another goal—with corresponding plan and deadline—to edit those into a book.
Don’t let one slip-up derail your whole project.
Did you skip an entire week of writing? Did you ignore your project while caring for a sick child or vacationing in Mexico? Life happens. And you deserve a break. Consider scheduling vacation breaks into your plan. But when they happen out of the blue, don’t get too down on yourself. Adjust your deadlines accordingly and get back to it!
Make sure to WRITE DOWN (or adjust in your digital calendar) the new dates you’re due to complete your project so you continue to have an accurate date to work towards (there’s nothing worse than keeping the original dates in your schedule and constantly feeling like you’ve let yourself down—forget that!!).
Seek help for those aspects of the project you hate or feel overly challenged by.
If you don’t like writing, record your memories orally; you can always pay someone to transcribe the audio recording later.
If you can’t recall as much as you expected, enlist a family member to sit down to reminisce with you; take notes during your conversation for later reference.
And if you get your stories down but have no idea how to progress to a printed heirloom book, consider reaching out to me or another personal historian to get you to the next step—it’s what we do!
By the way: It takes incredible commitment and vision to even begin writing down your life stories—so kudos to you for taking steps to not only start, but to finish your personal legacy project!!
Most anticipated memoir & craft books of 2022
Personal historian Dawn Roode of Modern Heirloom Books lists her most anticipated books of 2022 for fans of memoir and the craft of writing. Mark your faves!
Normally when I write about books it’s because I have read them and am recommending them for some specific reason (such as these books to help you with your life writing). Today, however, I am offering up a list of books that are forthcoming this year and that are on my radar. I thought you might like to check them out, too, and pre-order any that pique your interest.
Life writing, craft, and memory-keeping books
Who knows if the list for this first theme of books—about writing memoir and preserving legacies—will grow as the year goes on. For now, these are the three nonfiction titles I am anticipating in 2022. If you’re in the market for more books on how to write your stories, writing and memory prompts, and more craft-themed books, check out my reviews of current titles here.
Write It All Down: How to Put Your Life on the Page
By Cathy Rentzenbrink (Pan Macmillan; January 2022)
From the publisher: “Why do we want to write and what stops us? How do we fight the worry that no-one will care what we have to say? What can we do to overcome the obstacles in our way? … Intertwined with reflections and exercises, Write It All Down is at once an intimate conversation and an invitation to share your story.”
Keep the Memories, Lose the Stuff
By Matt Paxton (Portfolio; February 8)
From the publisher: “America’s top cleaning expert and star of the hit series Legacy List with Matt Paxton distills his fail-proof approach to decluttering and downsizing. Your boxes of photos, family’s china, and even the kids’ height charts aren’t just stuff; they’re attached to a lifetime of memories—and letting them go can be scary. With empathy, expertise, and humor, Keep the Memories, Lose the Stuff helps you sift through years of clutter, let go of what no longer serves you, and identify the items worth keeping so that you can focus on living in the present.”
This is a topic near and dear to my heart (see my free guide “After a Death: How to Make the Process of Going through Your Parents’ Photos Easier”), and I look forward to seeing how Paxton shares his wisdom. A favorite bit of personal historian advice with respect to sorting through your stuff: Take high-quality photographs of items that hold meaning but perhaps take up too much space or no longer feel relevant to your life; this way you can write about why these heirlooms mattered to you (and your family), where and when they originated, etc.—then, after preserving their history, you can give them away without unnecessary guilt.
Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative
By Melissa Febos (Catapult; March 15, 2022)
“If I could do cartwheels, I would have cartwheeled across the room when I learned that the brilliant Melissa Febos is gifting us with a memoir craft book,” writes one reviewer on LitHub.
From the publisher: “How might we go about capturing on the page the relationships that have formed us? How do we write about our bodies, their desires and traumas? What does it mean for an author’s way of writing, or living, to be dismissed as ‘navel-gazing’—or else hailed as ‘so brave, so raw’? And to whom, in the end, do our most intimate stories belong? … Melissa Febos has created a captivating guide to the writing life, and a brilliantly unusual exploration of subjectivity, privacy, and the power of divulgence.”
How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth
By The Moth, Meg Bowles, Catherine Burns, Jenifer Hixson, Sarah Austin Jenness (April 26, 2022)
I’ve never been drawn to going up onstage to share my stories at a mic, but I am a frequent guest at story slams and Moth main stage performances (migrating to their storytelling podcast during the pandemic)—and I have always marveled at how well the coaching works. Seriously, introverted writers and self-declared non-performers shine when they’re telling their stories for The Moth, and often that can be attributed to having workshopped their material with a team of educators who help develop and shape their stories. Goals? “To hook us in. Make us care about you… [and] conclude as a different person.”
So of course I’m invested in reading their new book that promises to share “secrets of their time-honed process and [use] examples from notable and beloved storytellers,...[and to help you] mine your memories for your best stories.” Everyone has a story to share, so why not share it well?
Biography & Memoir
I firmly believe that reading memoir—good memoir, truthful and well-structured memoir—is a bridge to writing memoir. So beyond the mere sensory pleasure of reading any of the below suggestions, if you are someone who regularly writes about your life or has aspirations to pen your own memoir, take notes when you come across something especially compelling. Does the author employ dialogue to great effect? How do they weave the past and the present? How to they convey universal meaning from singular personal experiences?
My regular readers will know I have an affinity for memoirs told in shorter snippets—often referred to as vignettes—and I am especially eager to read the following from the list below, all examples of the memoir-in-essays form: Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives by Mary Laura Philpott (April); The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays by CJ Hauser (July); and Crying in the Bathroom by Erika L. Sánchez (July).
Lost & Found: A Memoir
By Kathryn Schulz (Random House; January 11, 2022)
Named one of the most anticipated books of the year by The New York Times, Oprah Daily, The Washington Post, and others, Lost & Found is undoubtedly one of the most awaited books of 2022.
Eighteen months before the author’s father died, she met the woman she would marry. In Lost & Found, according to the publisher, “she weaves the stories of those relationships into a brilliant exploration of how all our lives are shaped by loss and discovery—from the maddening disappearance of everyday objects to the sweeping devastations of war, pandemic, and natural disaster; from finding new planets to falling in love.”
“Three very different American families form the heart of Lost & Found: the one that made Schulz’s father, a charming, brilliant, absentminded Jewish refugee; the one that made her partner, an equally brilliant farmer’s daughter and devout Christian; and the one she herself makes through marriage.”
Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom
By Carl Bernstein (Henry Holt; January 11, 2022)
According to the publisher, in this book “Carl Bernstein, the Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of All the President’s Men and pioneer of investigative journalism, recalls his beginnings as an audacious teenage newspaper reporter in the nation’s capital—a winning tale of scrapes, gumshoeing, and American bedlam.” As a huge fan of the Alan Pakula–directed film and a former magazine editor myself, I am so on board for this account from one of journalism’s most iconic personalities.
Here’s Bernstein on first entering the newsroom of the Washington Evening Star as a high schooler: “The door by which I had entered was at the end of a dim, quiet corridor of the sort you would find in any ordinary place of business. The door through which Rudy Kauffmann now led me opened into another universe. People were shouting. Typewriters clattered and chinged. Beneath my feet, I could feel the rumble of the presses…. In my whole life I had never heard such glorious chaos or seen such purposeful commotion as I now beheld in that newsroom. By the time I had walked from one end to the other, I knew that I wanted to be a newspaperman.” Read an excerpt from Chasing History here.
I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home
By Jami Attenberg (Ecco; January 11, 2022)
In her first memoir, acclaimed author “Jami Attenberg—described as a ‘master of modern fiction’ (Entertainment Weekly) and the ‘poet laureate of difficult families’ (Kirkus Reviews)—reveals the defining moments that pushed her to create a life, and voice, she could claim for herself,” shares the publisher. “What does it take to devote oneself to art? What does it mean to own one’s ideas? What does the world look like for a woman moving solo through it?”
In a review for Vogue, Jessie Heyman opines, “Her newest is an episodic collection of Attenberg’s life—her cross-country travels, debilitating injuries, bad plane rides, bad boyfriends—which are all told through her signature intimate and humorous style. But it’s her writing on her own work I found particularly revealing. ‘I became a fiction writer in the first place because stories are a beautiful place to hide,’ she writes.”
Aurelia, Aurélia
By Kathryn Davis (Graywolf; March 1, 2022)
From the publisher: “Kathryn Davis’s hypnotic new book is a meditation on the way imagination shapes life, and how life, as it moves forward, shapes imagination. At its center is the death of her husband, Eric. The book unfolds as a study of their marriage, its deep joys and stinging frustrations; it is also a book about time, the inexorable events that determine beginnings and endings.”
“She writes about being a teenager, trying on identities like clothes, and about being in late middle age, resolutely someone, and yet still wondering, still trying on the other clothes, even while liking her own,” notes a LitHub review.
Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory
By Sarah Polley (Penguin Press; March 1, 2022)
“These are the most dangerous stories of my life,” Sarah Polley writes in her new memoir. “The ones I have avoided, the ones I haven’t told, the ones that have kept me awake on countless nights. As these stories found echoes in my adult life, and then went another, better way than they did in childhood, they became lighter and easier to carry.”
Polley, an Oscar nominated screenwriter, director, and actor, shares six essays, “each one [capturing] a piece of [her] life as she remembers it, while at the same time examining the fallibility of memory, the mutability of reality in the mind, and the possibility of experiencing the past anew, as the person she is now but was not then,” describes the publisher.
If you haven’t seen Polley’s 2012 film Stories We Tell, it too explores the vagaries of truth and the intersection of the past and present, and I highly recommend it (read my review here), perhaps as a prelude to her memoir.
In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss
By Amy Bloom (Random House; March 8, 2022)
From one of my all-time favorite writers, Amy Bloom (I still recall discovering her book of stories Come to Me the year after I graduated college and knowing I would buy anything she wrote thereafter), this new memoir explores the period of time she accompanied her husband, Brian, through the final days of his life. After a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s, the pair begin a heartrending journey of finding a way that Brian can end his life with dignity.
“Most poignant are the intimate moments they share as they make the most of their last days together,” reads the starred review in Publisher’s Weekly. “As [Bloom] writes, ‘I imagine that Brian feels as alone as I do but I can tell he isn’t as afraid.’ The result is a stunning portrayal of how love can reveal itself in life’s most difficult moments.”
Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation
By Maud Newton (Random House; March 29, 2022)
“I never expected to become interested in genealogy,” Maud Newton writes in this 2014 Harper’s cover story that led to her book deal. “When I did, slowly at first and then in great gusts of extreme obsession, I thought I owed the fascination to my mom, a natural storyteller descended from a collection of idiosyncratic Texans. One of her granddads was a strident Dallas socialist; the other killed a man with a hay hook. Her father, Robert Bruce, is said to have been married thirteen times to twelve women.”
According to the publisher, “Maud researched her genealogy…and sought family secrets through her DNA. But immersed in census archives and cousin matches, she yearned for deeper truths…. Searching, moving, and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writer’s attempt to use genealogy—a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry—to expose the secrets and contradictions of her own ancestors, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us.”
The Unwritten Book: An Investigation
By Samantha Hunt (FSG; April 5, 2022)
More reviews than I can count recommend this book to me. A few, to entice:
“Like a trunk in the attic, The Unwritten Book offers up the most extraordinary, eclectic, and heart-wrenching insights, historical facts, stories, and advice on how to live closer to the dead…. I feel more alive and wiser for having read it,” declares author Cathy Park Hong.
From Rumaan Alam: “The Unwritten Book is a disobedient work—not quite memoir (even as the author interrogates her own life); not quite philosophy (though with much to say on art, faith, ethics, and more); not quite classifiable.”
And from LitHub: ”Fueled by the discovery of her father’s unfinished manuscript, Samantha Hunt is on the hunt (sorry) for clues about all that is left unsaid. Part literary criticism, part memoir, part family history, this new book explores the things that have a hold on us. I, for one, am ready to be haunted by Samantha Hunt once again.”
“Each chapter gathers subjects that haunt: dead people, the forest, the towering library of all those books we’ll never have time to read or write,” notes the publisher. “Through literary criticism, family history, history, and memoir…Hunt explores questions of motherhood, hoarding, legacies of addiction, grief, how we insulate ourselves from the past, how we misinterpret the world.”
Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life: A Memoir
By Delia Ephron (Little Brown; April 12, 2022)
Time magazine calls Left on Tenth “a heart-wrenching tale of second chances at life and love” for author and screenwriter Delia Ephron, who chronicles her (often hilarious, always vulnerable) journey of falling in love again after the death of her husband. “But this was not a rom-com: four months later she was diagnosed with AML, a fierce leukemia.”
Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives: A Memoir in Essays
By Mary Laura Philpott (Atria Books; April 12, 2022)
In this memoir in essays, Philpott sets out to “illuminate what it means to move through life with a soul made of equal parts anxiety and optimism (and while she’s at it, to ponder the mysteries of backyard turtles and the challenges of spatchcocking a turkey),” according to the publisher. “Philpott returns in her distinctive voice to explore our protective instincts, the ways we continue to grow up long after we’re grown, and the limits—both tragic and hilarious—of the human body and mind.”
One Off the Shelf reviewer highlighted this memorable line from Philpott’s book, which makes me even more eager to read it: “I keep trying to make sense of my life by stacking stories upon stories upon stories.” Indeed, don’t we all.
The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays
By CJ Hauser (Doubleday; July 12, 2022)
“I think I was afraid that if I called off my wedding I was going to ruin myself. That doing it would disfigure the story of my life in some irredeemable way, CJ Hauser wrote in The Paris Review essay, also called “The Crane Wife.”
“What I understood on the other side of my decision,” she wrote, “on the gulf, was that there was no such thing as ruining yourself. There are ways to be wounded and ways to survive those wounds, but no one can survive denying their own needs.”
From the publisher: In The Crane Wife, CJ Hauser “writes about friends and lovers, blood family and chosen family, and asks what more expansive definitions of love might offer us all. Told with the late-night barstool directness of your wisest, most bighearted friend, [this] is a book for everyone whose life doesn’t look the way they thought it would; for everyone learning to find joy in the not-knowing; for everyone trying, if sometimes failing, to build a new sort of life story, a new sort of family, a new sort of home, to live in.”
Crying in the Bathroom: A Memoir
By Erika L. Sánchez (Viking; July 12, 2022)
From the New York Times bestselling author of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter comes an utterly original memoir-in-essays that promises to be as deeply moving as it is hilarious.
From the publisher’s page: “In these essays, Sánchez writes about everything from sex to white feminism to debilitating depression, revealing an interior life rich with ideas, self-awareness, and perception. Raunchy, insightful, unapologetic, and brutally honest, Crying in the Bathroom is Sánchez at her best—a book that will make you feel that post-confessional high that comes from talking for hours with your best friend.” I’m in.
As yet untitled MEMOIR of Paul Newman
(Knopf; Autumn 2022)
With the hope of debunking the numerous unsolicited biographies about Paul Newman over the years, the actor and philanthropist began recording his life story through oral history interviews with friend Stewart Stern in 1986 (“I should probably at least make some truthful self-examination so the unsolicited biographies wouldn’t be considered as gospel,” he reportedly told Stern).
According to the publisher, the “result is a portrait of the actor in full, from his early days to his years in the Navy, from his start in Hollywood to his rise to stardom, and with an intimate glimpse of his family life.
I met Newman when I volunteered to help set up his first camp, the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Ashford, Connecticut, when I was a senior in high school, and was in awe of his selfless nature (and wonderfully mischievous sense of humor), so I especially look forward to hearing stories from his life in his own words.
Diaries & journals
Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965-2000
Edited by Valerie Boyd (Simon & Schuster; April 12, 2022)
From the publisher: “In an unvarnished and singular voice, [Alice Walker] explores an astonishing array of events: marching in Mississippi with other foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr.; her marriage to a Jewish lawyer, defying laws that barred interracial marriage in the 1960s South; an early miscarriage; writing her first novel; the trials and triumphs of the Women’s Movement; erotic encounters and enduring relationships; the ancestral visits that led her to write The Color Purple; winning the Pulitzer Prize; being admired and maligned, sometimes in equal measure, for her work and her activism; and burying her mother. A powerful blend of Walker’s personal life with political events, this revealing collection offers rare insight into a literary legend.”
The Diaries of Franz Kafka
Translated by Ross Benjamin (Schocken; December 6, 2022)
This new translation of Kafka’s handwritten diaries dating from 1909 to 1923, according to the publisher, contains “accounts of daily events, reflections, observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, accounts of dreams, as well as finished stories. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of the diary entries and provides substantial new content, including details, names, literary works, and passages of a sexual nature that were omitted from previous publications. By faithfully reproducing the diaries' distinctive—and often surprisingly unpolished—writing in Kafka's notebooks, translator Ross Benjamin brings to light not only the author's use of the diaries for literary experimentation and private self-expression, but also their value as a work of art in themselves.”
Other memoir & biography titles to look out for in 2022
The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found by Frank Bruni (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster; March 1, 2022)
I Was Better Last Night by Harvey Fierstein (Knopf; March 1, 2022)
Easy Beauty: A Memoir by Chloé Cooper Jones (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster; April 5, 2022)
Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris (Little, Brown and Company; May 31, 2022)
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Life Story Links: January 18, 2022
Our curated roundup is back, filled to the brim with stories you'll want to bookmark: on memoir (reading and writing), preservation, family history & more.
“A writer—and, I believe, generally all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
—Jorge Luis Borges
Vintage photo of a young girl in Franklin Township, New Jersey, February 1936, by Carl Mydans for the U.S. Resettlement Administration. Photograph courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Digital Collection.
First-person stories & memoir recommendations
THE POWER OF RECLAIMING HER NAME
After a wave of racism, her husband challenged her to reclaim her Asian name as a way to be proud of who she is. Marian Chia-Ming Liu re-introduces herself—and shares meaning behind all four parts of her name.
WHAT TO READ THIS YEAR
I compiled a list of my most anticipated books of 2022 in the categories of memoir, letters and journals, and the craft of writing. Which ones will make it onto your bookshelf?
ON SURVIVAL
“This memoir, [Mala’s Cat], rescued from obscurity by the efforts of Mala Kacenberg’s five children, should be read and cherished as a new, vital document of a history that must never be allowed to vanish.”
THE TASK OF REMEMBERING
“The premise of much of Clifton’s work is that memory persists even in the absence of words, details, and all of the trappings of what we know as ‘history.’” A thoughtful examination of poet Lucille Clifton’s 1976 memoir, Generations, which has been reissued.
TWO TO CHECK
A Chicago Tribune reviewer names a pair of memoirs about fresh starts—Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz and I Came All This Way to Meet You by Jami Attenberg—not only as two of the best books of 2022, but as “the product manuals for two authors, and ultimately, tangentially, for yourself.”
One story at a time
PRESERVING A VIVID LEGACY
“Even though there is a trove of letters between this man and his daughter, they demand a lot of research to provide context and explanation,” Washington–based personal historian Nancy Burkhalter describes of the process behind a recent biography.
BRIDGING DIVIDES
“It’s going to take a lot of stories to bring this country together,” 60 Minutes reporter Norah O'Donnell says to Dave Isay, founder of One Small Step, a StoryCorps. offshoot that pairs people from opposing political views for conversations about their lives, not their beliefs.
UNCOVERING STORIES FROM SLAVE SHIPWRECKS
“Through these ships, we could bring lost stories up from the depths and back into collective memory.” National Geographic dives into the untold history of the Transatlantic slave trade with its new podcast, “Into the Depths,” launching January 27.
LIFE LESSONS
“For those who make it to old old age, there remains the challenge: How do you make a full and meaningful life when you can’t do so many of the things you once did? At the end of life, what turns out to really matter, and what is just noise?” NYT reporter John Leland reflects on a series he did following a group of the oldest New Yorkers—over seven years and 21 articles.
Writing about our lives—why, how, when
BRINGING VOICE TO ANCESTOR’S HISTORICAL NARRATIVE
“I loved my time in the archives. The tedium of transcription alternated with a quickening heartbeat that came with a new discovery.” Sally Merriam Wait’s journal “passed through seven matriarchal descendants before it came my way,” says Mary Tribble, who found kinship with her fourth great-grandmother.
3 WAYS TO TELL A PHOTO STORY
Modern memory-keeping doesn’t have to be time-consuming, but it should be meaningful. Here are three simple and elegant ideas for preserving the story behind one favorite photo (with the hope that it will be the first of many!).
PUTTING LIFE ON THE PAGE
BBC Woman’s Hour host Emma Barnett is joined by psychotherapist Julia Samuel and authors Arifa Akbar, Cathy Rentzenbrink, and Ann Patchett to talk about why so many of us want to put our lives on the page: What stops us, what gets in the way, and is it always a good idea? Listen in below:
Finding family history
INVENTORY OF ARTIFACTS
After a lengthy effort, artifacts from collections in Lithuania and New York that document Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe before World War II will be accessible to scholars and others.
CHIMING IN
“I had set about surrounding myself with heirlooms and other objects connected to my heritage to inform and inspire my efforts to guide others in their memoirs and family-history work,” Megan St. Marie writes of the clock she placed in her Massachusetts office.
KEEP THE STORIES, LOSE THE STUFF?
“Watching the moving men removing bookcases and boxes, my life flashed by like a film running in reverse—whole epochs were excavated and carried out.” Wisconsin–based personal historian Sarah White on giving safe passage to belongings as she takes a step toward downsizing.
“THEIR STUFF, OUR STORIES”
“Our hearts aren’t accountants.” Martie McNabb of Show & Tales, Karen Hyatt of EstatePros, and Before I Die New Mexico festival organizer Gail Rubin delve into the stories behind our stuff in this engaging video:
Experts share knowledge
MAKING A PLAN
New York City–based archivist Margot Note talks to host Rick Brewer on the Let’s Reminisce podcast about creating family archives and making sense of all that gathered family information. Listen in:
SELF PORTRAITURE: YOU ON THE PAGE
What does it mean to write memoir, to engage in the personal, and to quest for universal truths and telling details in your life writing? Listen in (and take notes!) as writer and teacher Beth Kephart shares wisdom and writing prompts:
TAMING PHOTO CHAOS
NYC–based photo organizer Marci Brennan speaks to the host of the Anywhereist podcast about the nitty-gritty of getting your family photo archive under control—and there’s a helpful list of resources here, as well. Surprising tip: Many people should delete about 80 percent (!!) of their digital photos to preserve a meaningful legacy.
...and a few more links
Register for free RootsTech 2022, which will be held March 3-5, 2022.
24 writers help publish a book about living in Alexandria during segregation.
How Kenneth Branagh’s family left turmoil in Belfast
Biographer discusses the life of explorer Ernest Shackleton
Massachusetts–based personal historian Megan St. Marie explores her Acadian heritage through two objects she holds dear.
Soldier’s WWII letter to his mother delivered after 76 years
“Succession star Brian Cox spares no one—including himself—in his new memoir.”
Short Takes