When I attended the Story@Home2012 conference in February I learned some valuable information especially in regards to family history, making a business successful and blogging. For today’s Rock Soup I would like to share more of my typed notes from one of the presentations. Hopefully you’ll find some useful information on how to best collect information and writing a Personal History.

Writing up A personal History:

– It’s the simple daily things that make the best stories.
History: dates places, deaths, births, names.
Heritage: traditions, stories of immigrations, grandpa WW II , Personal stories behind the action for example a tradition of cutting off edges of roast before cooking. Original cause, stove was too small)
Healing = Ask questions about others past (helped one person to understand why one parent was not very affectionate. (didn’t learn how) this helped in the healing of the child of that reserved parent.
– Questions to ask yourself. Kids when they do something and they describe the ‘act’ that symbolizes something (anger/hatred/dishonesty and came up with a story. When you describe the same experience as the other child you humanize yourself.
– Sit down and ask yourself questions. Do it during invisible time. Some questions to ask might be
First car, First date, first toy etc.
– Pass along heritage and values in stories an example is remembering something that went/happened better than you expected.
– Discuss marriage memories. Identify three times where there was ‘trouble’ in the marriage; What was our first house;
– How to get stories from others. 1. Ask questions such as 3-5 questions of mother and make sure siblings are present. Do you have any pictures that aren’t in the photo albums Have you
– We are only fearful of things we don’t know or we don’t understand.