How to Create History with Your Family
A perfect activity for long summer nights
Hey folks,
If you know me IRL, you’ve probably heard me talk about a multi-year project I’ve been frustrated by: Trying to figure out where my grandmother is from. I had long assumed she was born in El Salvador, which is where my mother was born, but after my grandmother died in 2013, it came out that she might have been born in Spain. Maybe. No one is sure.
I’ve been trying to figure out the answers ever since.
Frustrating my research is the inconvenient fact that she was born in 1925 (Happy 100th birthday, Abuela!), so records are spotty at best. Things are not digitized. Both Spain and El Salvador have been through civil wars since then, which destroyed the fragile paper records that would tell me more. We think her birth certificate was lost when she fled the Salvadoran Civil War for California, and if she ever got it replaced, that replacement has since been lost.
If only I had asked her while she was alive.
There’s a lot I wish I’d asked her. Every time I make pupusas, I get mad I never asked her to show me how she made them (I’m just not using the same cheese she did, and dozens of experiments have not yielded a revelation of the cheese she chose). What are the names of her siblings still in El Salvador? Hell, did she like living in the US, or did she hope to go back someday? I was 18 when she got sick and 22 when she died, too young to realize she wouldn’t be around to answer my questions forever.
Now, I have regrets. Lots of them. Both on a personal level and a professional one, because who knows what stories have been lost? If she was born in Spain, that means she probably fled Francisco Franco’s reign. If she’s from the part of Spain I think she is, she was part of his early exiles, before he started slaughtering people. (Franco’s genocides are rarely taught in US K-12 curricula, but he killed almost as many people as Hitler did.) What could she have told me not just about her personal life, but about the history she witnessed?
Which brings me to my point: Ask your family about their history now.
I know it can be awkward, maybe even bring up some bad memories they’d rather not examine. (My mother hates to talk about the civil war she witnessed.) But these stories are so valuable not just to you personally, but often to historians.
It used to be that historians only cared about Very Important People like presidents and kings and aristocrats. But social history has taken the study of civilizations much further, and the whole field now knows there is tons of value in the histories of regular folks. Not only can they tell us about how Very Important People were perceived, but they can tell us about the reality of living in any place at any one time. They can tell us a lot about why big historical movements or moments happened. For example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination doesn’t make sense without an understanding of how beloved he was and the impact he had on the nation; his charisma and power are a story best told through the eyes of his followers.
So. Go ask. Here are some tips on how to have those conversations and how to document them.
Ask For Permission
Don’t accost a family member with a running tape recorder and start asking intense personal questions! This is why celebrities hate the paparazzi! Your family members, who are likely not Brad Pitt, are probably not used to having a microphone shoved in their faces. So ease into it.
Ask beforehand if you can ask about your family history. Explain why you’re interested. If they say no, ask if there’s a better setting or a better time to do it. Be aware of who you’re asking and their comfort levels.
Record Conversations
Once you've got permission, you’re going to want to record conversations. Don’t rely on just your memory, because you won’t remember every word, every name, every inflection. Use your smartphone, or get a voice recorder.
Start with Easy Questions
Once you’ve gotten permission and you’re equipped, start out with easy questions:
Where did you go to school? What was it like?
What were your hobbies in your teens, twenties, thirties, etc?
Is there anything you remember most vividly from childhood? Why?
Can you tell me about your family, your siblings?
This is good for warming folks up to the exercise and encourages them to open up more. It’s like a first date; you don’t just jump in asking about trauma.
Once they’re comfortable, you can get into the more intense things. This can happen over a few sessions.
Ask Follow-Up Questions
This is the biggest thing I learned in my brief flirtation with journalism. You’d be amazed how many people just…don’t ask a follow-up. They just accept whatever answer they’re told, which is frankly insane. ASK. FOLLOW UP. QUESTIONS.
Example: Your grandfather says his high school experience was “normal” or “boring” or “like everyone else.” Well what does that actually mean? Did he go to an all boys school, was that what was “normal”? What was their schedule like, did they let out for spring planting? Was there a football team? Did they have cotillion, prom, home ec classes? There are one million differences between a modern high school education and one just fifty years ago.
They might be reluctant to admit things. Everyone has stuff they’re embarrassed about, and your grandparents might not want to admit that they made a mistake or were on the wrong side of history at some point. They may not want to talk about their feelings about desegregation or the Vietnam War or World War II because they feel like they were wrong about it then and have seen the errors of their ways. They might be afraid of being judged—that emotion doesn’t go away with age!
Do Your Own Research
This is similar to following up, and is especially important if you’re asking about a specific event. If you know someone who witnessed the March on Washington or the Watts Uprising in LA—any sort of “rebellious” activity—there are often discrepancies between the Official Account and what participants experienced. So it can be helpful to ask things like, “I read that x, y, z, happened, is that what you saw?”
As I’ve done my research, I’ve noticed that my mother’s perspective of the Salvadoran Civil War is very different from the Very Official Government Accounts. The war, as she saw it, was a completely different historical moment. These are important stories.
Be Open-Minded
Maybe this should be first on the list. It is going to be key for you to be open-minded and non-judgmental about whatever they tell you. They’ve chosen to share a big piece of their personal history with you; that type of opening up should be appreciated.
Preserve It
I think in this age of digital storage, most of us know this already, but it bears repeating: Back everything up. Have a couple of copies that a couple of people can access. A friend of mine has a family Gmail account separate from any of their personal ones; all family history documents get backed up to that email and Drive storage. I personally have copies of everything on hand, but the originals are in a fireproof safety deposit box.
But preserving it is also more than that. If you’ve been alive since the 1980s or 90s, you know how quickly technology changes. Having a cassette tape recording is already obsolete; VHS tapes are a thing of the past. So, how are you going to ensure that future you—and future generations—can access the history you’ve documented? I recommend transcribing everything and printing it out. I know that seems tedious, but it’s one good way to ensure that almost anyone can access it even if the original recording gets damaged.
You can also do a bit of research about audio recording trends. I love WAV files (and all my podcasts are initially saved that way), but it’s not a useful way to play audio because of the large storage space it requires. Right now, MP3 is the best way to play audio, but that could change. (We were just saying that about CDs, after all.) Duplicating and converting into more than one file format is going to be your friend.
Share It
I said at the top that these histories are important to historians, and I meant it. But how do you get things into the hands of historians? It depends on the story being told. If your family members have lived in the same town for generations, seek out a local history council or chapter, someone preserving local history on a larger scale. Some local public libraries might accept documentation for exhibits they want to have.
If they’re talking about a specific event, there is probably a historian studying it or an organization dedicated to it. Say someone in your family lives in Ottawa now, but in the 1950s lived in Little Rock, Arkansas and witnessed the Little Rock Nine. There are a few people who this could appeal to: Historians of immigration (when did they move? why? was it because of the tense atmosphere of desegregation?), historians of civil rights movements, historians of social issues. Go to history departments on university websites and look at their faculty; a lot of these lists can sort by interest or time period, so you can look up just folks interested in twentieth-century immigration, or whatever.
You must get permission to do this step.
Permission to record is not the same. Informed consent is important, and that includes informing someone of every step of the process.
If, after you record, you think there’s something worth sharing, tell them that. Show them what you’re going to share! Ask if it’s okay. They might want to redact names or have their account by anonymous.
If they’re dead, you still have to do this. Consent doesn’t end with life. You have to ask their heirs for permission to share things. Copyright does apply in these cases and you can get sued! (Check your country’s standards on this.)
Too Intimidated? Family Member Hates Chatting?
Some people are not chatty. Talking about an experience can be too painful, or they might be intimidated by the recording aspect. For those people, there are now lines of books dedicated to journaling the answers to these sorts of questions. Here is a list of a few of them:
I think these are great as starting points. But there are two problems I see with them:
They don’t leave a ton of room to write, which erases any subtlety your family member might want to share.
They’re by necessity nonspecific. So while they’re good as a starting point, you can’t ask follow-ups in the moment, you can’t get information about a particular moment. It’s all generic, like “what advice would you give me to share with my children”? A great question and probably meaningful, but not specific.
If you’re just starting out and you don’t know if someone will be comfortable answering questions, this might be a great way to get them started!
Have you documented your family history? Share your tips in the comments! 👇
Wow I really loved this post and all the extremely practical tips you gave!