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The
"Your Life is Your Story" Blog Archives
© Tom
Gilbert
Read
about
quality family history and life story news, views, methods, products,
links, services
...and whatever else catches our fancy of personal
historian
October,
2018
current
blog entries
blog
archive
index
Putting Your Story in Order
October 24, 2018
If you are a subscriber of my free Your Life Is Your Story newsletter
then you have already probably read the featured article for October
about putting your story in order. I make some points about how and why
this is important as you are doing your life story writing and
organizing your material.
There is not one way to organize your experiences. But I think it can be helpful to try some different approaches.
The order of
your stories in your memoir is important. It can establish a theme and a
tempo. One way is to put it in chronological order. Start at the
beginning of the time of the story and move
across time to the place where the story concludes. This is probably the
easiest approach, but it isn’t necessarily the best way to do it.
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This Month Share Your
Family Stories
October 16, 2018
October is National
Family History Month. We are halfway through the month,
but it is not too late for you to try to preserve some of your family
stories. The first step is to sit down and have a talk with those
people in your family who have the interesting and important stories to
tell. As they remind us at the Talk of a Lifetime
site, those stories will only last forever if you have that talk with
your family members and pass the stories on.
Probably everybody in your family is interested in knowing more about
their family elders. But not everyone is willing to be the family historian.
Hopefully someone is willing to take on that responsibility. Is it you?
Are you good at asking questions and then listening?
Nowadays we have so much technology at our fingertips that you don't
need to have super fancy equipment. Most smart phones will record
conversations with decent quality. Somebody needs to take the
responsibility of preserving your valuable family history. There is a
lot of information easily obtained to help you with this task (hint:
have you looked around
my site?). And there are lots of people who are available for hirewho
are good at helping you preserve life
stories (insert wink for another not so subtle hint).
Some of our stories are lighthearted and heartwarming. Others tell of
times of great challenge. Many families have both kinds of stories.
Your message in a story dealing with adversity may well be inspiration
for another, maybe even a complete stranger. Here's a story shared by
the Living Legacy Project about
immigrants from El Salvador years ago
who had to deal with some very tough times, the type of story that is
still happening today, more than thirty years later. You can read Rage,
Fear and Helplessness online.
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