Have you dreamed about recording a parent’s story? Or about writing your family’s history, and the path it took over the decades – now, while your grandparents can still tell you what they know? How about documenting the history of a company you built up from nothing, or recording the life of a long-beloved family home?

This is where a personal historian comes in.

I could read about writing, sometimes instead of sitting down and actually writing, until the cows come home. (“What cows?” asked my then-four-year-old with a puzzled look, once, when I used that expression.)

East Hawai‘i, of course, has so much interesting history, and one of the fun things about our tours is that we can sneak people into places one doesn’t ordinarily get to see.

Except a living man there is nothing
more wonderful than a book!
A message to us from the dead,
- from human souls whom we never saw,
who lived perhaps thousands of miles away;
and yet these, on those little sheets of paper,
speak to us, teach us, comfort us,
open their hearts to us as brothers.
-  Charles Kingsley (1819-1875)

Darien Gee is a Big Island writing dynamo, and acquaintance, whose new novel Friendship Bread (Ballantine Books/Random House) comes out April 5, 2011.