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.

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.

“The recently departed whose time overlapped with people still here are the Sasha, the living dead. They are not wholly dead, for they live on in the memories of the living … when the last person knowing an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the Sasha for the Zamani, the dead.”

The most interesting reaction was that of his grandchildren who sat fascinated. They had heard some of his tales over the years but for the first time they were able to get a true picture of just what an incredibly resilient and fascinating person their grandfather is.

Read this article and you’ll understand why I’m interested in gathering and writing personal histories.

This is a funny, timely, small-town story that came in Christopher Kimball’s email today.

I am not a picky eater, but cilantro (also known as coriander) tastes to me like something that has spoiled and should immediately be thrown away. I also would not be able to stand the wearing of this cilantro hat.

I was thrilled when I stumbled upon The Little Travelers, a series of DVDs by a southern California woman talented in video production who homeschools her two little girls and travels extensively with them.

I sometimes do what people call “spring cleaning” at the end of a year, when I get a hankering to straighten up the place — to get rid of some of the clutter that inevitably creeps into our house over the months, clean, and make room for a fresh, clean new year and its possibilities.
It was in the middle of my current purging of no-longer-needed papers from file cabinets and taking no-longer-worn clothes to Goodwill that I stumbled across a project by the photographer Michael Wolf.
Wolf is a German photographer who …