In this Monday’s Link Roundup, don’t miss photos and art and memory and books: this is personal history. It’s a link to a wonderful video that captures the heart of why we do what we do as personal historians. For those of you attending the APH Conference, you’ll want to check out Revisiting turn-of-the-century Kamloops. It looks at the book written by Robert Budd, one of this year’s keynote speakers.

• Five Best Book Recommendation Services. “It’s disappointing to haul a book home from the library or shell out hard-earned cash at the bookstore only to settle in at home and find you don’t enjoy it one bit. Stock your reading list with these five great recommendation services.”

• The Pivotal Point: Not Giving Up Too Soon. “There comes a point when being a business owner gets really hard (and I mean really hard). You’ve come up with your big idea, you’ve done all the initial legwork to set it up, and now comes the hard part: Getting the word out about your business and, more importantly, hanging in there while you get the word out about your business. The hard part now becomes not giving up too soon.”

• photos and art and memory and books: this is personal history. “It’s the end of a busy couple of weeks where I have been focused on a lot of things–training and financials and marketing–everything except what I love the most: making books from photos and memories. I came across this fabulous project in my Facebook stream late last night and just had to share it with everyone I could think of.”

• Our Canada – Our Stories. “Canada 150 is a national, not-for-profit campaign to celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday in 2017 by encouraging the recording and collecting of life stories, family histories as well as community and organization histories.”

• Anecdote’s Story Finder Is a Treasure Trove. “I got a newsletter from Anecdote, the Australian consulting firm, that announced its Story Finder. There it was — a database with a slew of topics, arrange alphabetically, each topic with at least one story just a click away. What a fabulous resource!”

• Favorite Historical Tweeps. “Twitter has tons of historical trivia to offer. These are some of the fun-to-follow history tweeps I’ve been enjoying.”

• Revisiting turn-of-the-century Kamloops. “Voices of British Columbia: Stories from Our Frontier…[is] a collection of tales from the pioneers and the first generation of people who lived and settled in B.C. The book is based on 2,700 hours of audio recordings by CBC Radio journalist Imbert Orchard, who travelled the province from 1959 to 1966 interviewing 998 pioneers…The book’s author, Robert Budd, said these are the stories of the fishermen, the road builders, the ranchers and miners…The book is accompanied by the audio recordings from the original interviews…At the time, he had no idea among those archives was one of the largest oral-history collections in the world — the Orchard collection.”

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If you’re like me, you’ve inherited old photo albums with the pictures held down on so called magnetic pages. The trouble with these albums  is that the adhesive used and the plastic liners damage the photos over time. Removing the photos is a priority. I went looking for help and boiled my research down to these seven essential steps.

Step 1. Before attempting any photo removal make certain to scan digitally  each album page so that should a photo be damaged, you can still recover it from the scanned image.

Step 2. Select a practice photo that has no value to you or is badly out of focus. A word of caution. When removing  photos be sure not to curl or peel them back as this could cause permanent damage.

Step 3. Use a piece of dental floss and carefully pull it under one corner of the photo. Using a sawing motion slowly work your way to the opposite corner. With any luck the photo should pop right off.

Step 4. If  a photo is glued so tightly that floss won’t work, then try one of the following removal methods:

a. Use un-do, an adhesive remover that won’t harm photos. It comes with an applicator that allows you to slip the remover under the photo.

b. Place the album page in your freezer for a few minutes. The glue will become brittle, making it easier to remove the photo.

c. Use a hair dryer set on low heat. Run it back and forth on the back of the page holding the photo. Be careful not to overheat the photo as this could damage it. Once the glue has softened, quickly and carefully remove the picture.

d. Place the photo album page in a microwave. Make certain there are no metallic pieces. Start the microwave and run it for five seconds. Check the photo and keep using five  second blasts until the glue softens and the photo comes free.

Step 5. Take your photos and where possible  write on the back the following information: the names of people in the photo, their ages,  the year, the location, and the event. Avoid using a ball point pen as this could damage the photo. Use a soft lead pencil or an acid free pen available from a craft store.

Step 6. Digitally scan your photos, store them on your hard drive, and than upload them to a web based site like Flickr or Picasa. That way if your hard drive crashes, you won’t lose your digitized photos.

Step 7. Store your photos in cardboard photo boxes that pass the Photographic Activity Test (PAT). You can obtain such boxes at Archival Methods, Carr McLean, Light Impressions, Gaylord, and University Products. If you have a large collection, layer an acid free sheet of paper between each photo. Photos should be kept in a cool room with low humidity. That generally means keeping them out of attics and basements.

Photo by iStockphoto

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And then there was a colleague at Victoria Hospice who told me of a unique funeral celebration he attended. A friend of the deceased gave a eulogy that was built entirely around photos of the  shoes in her friend’s life. Each pair of shoes had a story to tell.

In The Globe and Mail newspaper on Thursday, I read an essay entitled Family Ties. It tells the story of a son’s remembrance of his father through the neckties that were passed down to him. Here’s an excerpt:

The other day I was getting ready for work and went into my closet to get a tie…I reached for a brown-, blue- and white-striped tie and I remembered that it was one of my father’s. He died last year and shortly afterward my mother, who was almost 80, made the decision to sell the big house we all grew up in. It took her a while, but she finally tackled the job of cleaning out my father’s closets… My father had a lot of ties – dozens and dozens and dozens of them…. And so, on this morning, I found myself knotting my father’s tie, remembering how we stood in front of the mirror years ago, him teaching me how to get a half-Windsor just right. I smiled, knowing I might be the only person in the building that day with a tie on.

Another interesting use of objects to tell a story appeared on the NPR website. Entitled A Catalog — Literally — Of Broken Dreams, it reviews the book Important Artifacts, by New York Times op-ed page art director Leanne Shapton.  The NPR article points out:

Foregoing narrative entirely, Shapton tells the story of a couple’s relationship in the form of a staggeringly precise ersatz auction catalog that annotates the common detritus of a love affair — notes, CD mixes, e-mails, photos, books— and places the objects up for sale…. In choosing the conceit of an auction catalog, Shapton reminds us that the story of love can be told through the things we leave behind, but also by the condition in which we leave them.

All of this got me thinking. Wouldn’t it be interesting to do a memoir or life story built around the special things someone possesses?  Something to keep in mind. Have you already done something like this? Love to hear from you, if you have.

Photo by Kylie

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It’s not about dinner but the kind of conversations you have with your family and the stories you tell.

Robyn Fivush ~ Professor of Psychology, Emory University

“The family is the first and most enduring group you belong to,” says Barbara Fiese, a psychology professor at Syracuse University. “It provides a sense of belonging for children, adolescents and adults so the individual doesn’t have to feel isolated.”

We help create this bond by sharing our  family stories from the past and the present. Research conducted by Dr. Robyn Fivush shows that parents who take the time to tell their children about family events, inside jokes, nicknames and family successes and failures  produce adolescents with higher self-esteem and self-confidence.

We owe it to our children not only to make dinner a time for the family to gather but also a time to share the richness of our family stories.

Photo by Kirsten Jennings

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So much happens to us all over the years.  So much has happened within us and through us.  We are to take time to remember what we can about it and what we dare.  That’s what taking the time to enter the room (called “Remember”) means, I think.  It means taking time to remember on purpose. It means not picking up a book for once or turning on the radio, but letting the mind journey gravely, deliberately, back through the years that have gone by but are not gone.  It means a deeper, slower kind of remembering; it means remembering as a searching and finding.  The room is there for all of us to enter if we choose.

Frederick Buechner, from Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons

I like Buechner’s phrase “to remember on purpose”.  It says to me that engaging in the recording of our life story or that of another is not a frivolous undertaking. It’s serious work. It requires that we take the time to reflect on life’s journey and by so doing not only leave a legacy but a clearer understanding of self.

Will you enter the room called “Remember”?

Photo by Max R

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If you don’t know your history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.

Michael Crichton - (1942 – 2008) American author, producer, director, screenwriter and physician

We live in a world that prizes speed, innovation, newness and youth. We’re constantly looking forward. And in the process we’ve become strangers to our past. We’ve either never heard our family stories or forgotten many of them. We pay a price for this. We feel rootless, unconnected and at our deepest core anxious and unhappy.

Recording  and preserving our stories is not some flight of nostalgia. It is in fact a determined  act to reclaim our history.

Photo by justneal

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The other day in Zoomer magazine I read an interview with the English actress Emma Thompson. When asked what made her unhappy,  she said:

That, much to our great loss, we’ve turned away from the notion of elders, of wisdom. It’s an absolute disaster for the old and the young. It leads to fractures everywhere. But mostly a fracture in our concept of what it is to be human.

I’m reminded that in recording and preserving an older person’s  life story we are engaged in important work. We are honoring an elder. We are saying to that person, you count. Your life holds lessons for me and future generations. I value your story and don’t want it lost.  What a wonderful difference it would make in our communities if all our older citizens had the opportunity to tell their story. We would indeed become a more humane society. What are you doing to capture an elder’s life story?

Here are four books that demonstrate the wisdom and spirit of older people. Click on the title for more information.

• In the Arms of Elders: A Parable of Wise Leadership and Community Building (Paperback) by William H. Thomas
• What Are Old People For?: How Elders Will Save the World (Paperback) by William H. Thomas
• Number Our Days (Paperback) by Barbara Myerhoff
• How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth) (Hardcover) by Henry Alford

Photo by John Mueller

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Benjamin Disraeli

The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.

Benjamin Disraeli - (21 December 1804 – 19 April 1881) a British statesman who served twice as Prime Minister

This quote struck home. For my mother’s 90th birthday I interviewed her for thirteen hours over several weeks. I then edited this  into a 117 page hard cover book complete with photographs.  I thought I knew my mom pretty well.  Surprisingly, it wasn’t until I began to talk to her about her life in detail, that I really came to know her.  It deepened my love and affection for her because I saw more clearly the underlying values and passions that had directed her life.

If  you’ve been considering preparing a life story of a loved one, I urge you to make it happen this year. You won’t be disappointed.

The longer we listen to one another – with real attention – the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions.

Barbara Deming, (1917 – 1984) American feminist and advocate of nonviolent social change

We live in an age of opinions.  Everyone has an opinion about something. Is it just me, or do you find that annoying? That’s why I like this Barbara Deming quote. One of the rewards of helping  people  record and preserve their life stories is that you appreciate that we’re all interdependent.  We are connected by the great themes that bind us all – birth, love, illness, family, and loss. It’s our stories that count not our opinions.

Photo by ky_olsen

Soon after starting my personal history work, I had the opportunity to do a series of video interviews for a charming and accomplished woman who was at an early stage of Alzheimer’s. Both she and her family realized that if I didn’t get the stories recorded they would soon be lost forever. She thoroughly enjoyed my visits and seemed stimulated by the recall of familiar stories from her past. Today that same woman has deteriorated considerably but her family finds some comfort in knowing that her life lives on in these recordings we made.

The other day I read an article in MayoClinic.com Alzheimer’s: Mementos help preserve memories which seems to bear out my anecdotal observations about the value of life stories and Alzheimer’s. The article notes:

“Caregivers become the memory for their loved one with Alzheimer’s disease,” says Glenn Smith, Ph.D., a neuropsychologist at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. “By gathering memories, you can bring important events and experiences from your loved one’s past into the present. You’re the link to his or her life history….By creating a life story, you affirm for your loved one all the positive things he or she has done in life and can still do. Even after your relative’s memories start to fade, creating a life story shows that you value and respect his or her legacy. It also reminds you who your loved one was before Alzheimer’s disease.”

Tom Kitwood in his groundbreaking 1997 book, Dementia Reconsidered believes that a Life History Book for a person with dementia, complete with photographs, should become best practice. He says, “In dementia a sense of identity based on having a life story to tell may eventually fade. When it does biographical knowledge about a person becomes essential if that identity is still to be held in place.”

If you know a family member at an early stage of Alzheimer’s disease, you might give serious consideration to recording their life story. If you’re a professional personal historian unsure if you should work with clients who have dementia, give it serious consideration. You could be providing a wonderful gift.

Web related resources:

Alzheimer’s Association (USA)

Alzheimer Society (Canada)

The Fisher Center For Alzheimer’s Research Foundation

Photo by luca:sehnsucht