What stories have you been told about your birth? How did your parents meet? What were some of the best times for your family? What were the toughest and how did you get through them? What was the name of your first school? What was the first day of school like? Tell me about all the places you’ve lived. What brought you to each place?
These are typical questions you may have asked your parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, or friends at one time or another. Each question can be the portal to a wonderful story or a rich piece of family or community history. We enjoy hearing these stories and sharing them with one another. Some of us are lucky enough to have a family member who writes down these stories to ensure they won’t be forgotten. Unfortunately for most of us, we promise ourselves that we’ll gather and preserve those stories someday and all too often regret that stories were not collected while the grandparents or other key family members were still living. Today with home computer technology greatly simplified and more affordable than ever, we can easily open the door to precious memories by recording and preserving our family history for many generations to come. The Oral History Workshop: Collect and Celebrate the Life Stories of Your Family and Friends, by Cynthia Hart, describes a structure for approaching your family oral history project and provides many delightful examples of how to get started and what questions to pose.
Even better yet: on Saturday, May 19, 1-4:00pm, Janice Dilg, one of Portland’s most notable oral historians, will conduct a free workshop at the Cedar Mill Community Library entitled Gathering & Preserving Your Family Oral History. If capturing a living legacy of your family, your friends, your church, or any other community resource you care about is something you’ve dreamt of doing, now is your chance to learn how to go about it. To ensure that we have ample handouts available, please register by emailing or calling Lynne Erlandson, lynnee@wccls.org, 503 644-0043 ext. 132.
You can listen to our oral history recordings with community members focused on immigration stories on our podcast page as well as interviews with our library founders. Also available in the library are many wonderful oral histories in print form. Here’s a sampling of a few you’ll find at CML (just a note, our catalog is being upgraded though May 16th, so some of these links may not work until then):
From the old country: an oral history of the European migration to America, by Bruce M. Stave
Hard times: an oral history of the great depression, by Studs Terkel
The Hood River Issei: an oral history of Japanese settlers in Oregon’s Hood River Valley, by Linda Tamura
Lost Voices from the Titanic: the definitive oral history, by Nick Barratt
Red scare: memories of the American Inquisition: an oral history, by Griffin Fariello
Tower Stories: an oral history of 9/11, edited by Damon DiMarco, foreword by Thomas Kean
Why? Because we still like you: an oral history of the Mickey Mouse Club, by Jennifer Armstrong
