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.

Hoppes perfectly captures why creating personal history projects (on paper, video or other) is important.

“America Writes Home” is a website with a wonderful collection of some existing pre-1920s letters, giving a flavor of that time before iPhones and email.

“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.

It’s one of my new writing interests, and something I’ve almost always been fascinated by (my uncle once told me I was born a genealogist) — I’m planning to start writing personal and family histories for people, in order to help preserve some of the great stories people carry around with them.

Recently I joined the Association of Personal Historians, which has just launched an anthology of 49 true stories out into the world. From the My Words Are Gonna Linger press release:
New anthology captures stories from real life, told in the …