Black History Month, A Celebration of Life: The StoryCorps Griot

February 1st marks the beginning of Black History Month, a time we give special attention to learning about the contributions, history and life stories of African Americans. One great resource to help us celebrate this month is The StoryCorps Griot Initiative.

Unique to Western Africa, a Griot (pronounced gree-oh) is a genealogist, a historian, a storyteller – who passes down family and community history to the next generation. In this spirit, StoryCorps spent a year (2007-2008) travelling around the US with their mobile recording booth recording and preserving the life stories of African American families.

StoryCorps Griot participants

StoryCorps Griot participants

The Griot recordings are archived at the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress. This ensures that these invaluable stories are not only preserved but also presented with dignity. Many of these recordings are available on YouTube (type “Storycorps Griot” into the search engine). Here are a couple of favorites we recommend. Enjoy!

 

Brigadier General Robert Crear

BG General Robert Crear, commanding General of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is interviewed in his hometown of Vicksburg, MS. The General speaks about his desire, at an early age, to become a successful member of the army, his projects in the Corps of Engineers and his current position as the first African American President of the Mississippi River Commission.

 

Charles Blue Sr.

Charles J. Blue Sr. is interviewed by his son about his personal history that led him to become a church organist and choir director. Notably, his interaction and involvement with Dr. Martin King Luther Jr.’s march in Greensboro and his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement is discussed.

 

Coincidentally, this month the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has highlighted in their Oscar awards the African American presence by having Chris Rock host and including numerous presenters. Enjoy the Oscar buzz!

Genes and Genealogy: Inextricably Linked to Discovering Personal History

MODIFIED TREE copyUncovering the life stories of our ancestors can help us answer many questions about who we are. They not only may be fascinating; they can provide valuable insights into our identity that cannot be answered by searching within oneself. The stories and archival documents from the past are also an invaluable resource for revealing our family’s medical history. Whether discussing it with our elders or combing records in search of important dates and names, it’s worth taking the time to look for clues that can help confirm or predict disorders for which we might be at risk.

In 2004, the Surgeon General declared Thanksgiving Day National Family History Day. At times when families gather, we are encouraged to talk about and record the health issues that have touched the family. But whether with beloved family members or newly discovered relatives, asking health-related questions can be a sensitive topic. “Why,” people will want to know “are you asking these questions?”

 

A STORY OF DISCOVERY

In 1993 Stanley M. Diamond, the founder of Jewish Records Indexing – Poland, learned through his nephew’s diagnosis that his Ashkenazi family with roots in Poland carries a newly identified mutation of beta thalassemia, a hereditary blood trait a gene concentrated in Jewish families with Sephardic roots. His  Beta-Thalassemia Project, now serves as a model for the link between genealogical research and the study of the evolution and spread of genetic diseases. He offers us some important advice on how to get the answers we need.

1.Researching your family’s medical history and making a genetic tree requires talking to everyone, and frequently more than once.

2. Don’t get caught wishing “If only!”. Talk with (and record) older generations now.

3. Face to face meetings are the best. When people have confidence in you, they are more likely to trust you with their medical history.

4. Allow the conversation to evolve. Don’t try to get all the information in one conversation.

5.  Carefully posing the medical/genetic question: How you say it and what you say should be tailored to your own comfort level and the nature of the reaction.

6.  Confidentiality must be respected; permission is necessary to share information.

Source: Genes and genealogy are different sides of a shared coin in personal history JewishGen.org

 

RECORD AND SHARE

The Surgeon General has created an online tool, My Family Health Portrait, to help record your family’s health history. You can enter information, learn about risks for conditions that run within your family and share with your healthcare provider. Please remember confidentiality must be respected. It is helpful though, to let those we speak to understand this information can be valuable for others and to their future generations and respectfully ask for permission to share.

Research of this kind is also valuable to non-family members. After Diamond discovered his family carried a novel mutation of the Beta Thalassemia trait, it was revealed that another family in Jerusalem carries the identical mutation. It has since been revealed, with the help of The Beta-Thalassemia Project, that more than a few Ashkenazic families carry the trait and can be at risk for this disease — a fact previously unknown. Now Diamond’s research, which started from a desire to help his family, encourages other families to document their medical history and make better health decisions.

Whatever your reasons are for recording your family’s legacy – genealogical or genetic – we encourage you to ask questions with your elders before the opportunity is lost. And no need to wait for Thanksgiving – start today!

Your Digital Legacy – Think Before You Post!

The desire to be remembered is both elemental and universal. Since time immemorial oral histories, diaries, memoirs and more recently, photographs and video have been used to preserve the memories of their authors. Today, we collect and curate our memorabilia more extensively than ever before. By doing this we not only preserve our memories, but in addition our online activity is actually recording present-day living.

Andy Warhol was once noted for saying “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” In his 2013 TED Talk Your Online Life, Permanent as a Tattoo, Futurist Juan Enriquez posits, what if Warhol had that backwards? What if, due to our online activity, all we get is 15 minutes of anonymity? It’s an interesting premise and one well worth examining.

Enriquez calls our digital footprint ‘electronic tattoos’. Like permanent designs on our skin, our online activity tells a very detailed and intimate story of our lives. The main difference, however, is that electronic tattoos will outlive our physical bodies.

Traditional preservation methods have allowed the storyteller to tell his story in his own time and his own way. Now big data collected from our tens of thousands of online interactions permits those who have access to them to make decisions about us in real time. This has never happened at any other time in history. Our digital footprint is constantly being analysed and the data used to provide information about us for job and college applications, dating prospects, even shopping experiences, amongst a plethora of other purposes.

bionic woman

And no matter our caution, facial recognition software like Face.com purchased by Facebook in 2012, have databases with over 18 billion faces and allows our identification through photos potentially captured by third parties in public spaces. All this is recorded and potentially accessible forever.

With this in mind, Enriquez encourages us to follow these timeless lessons:

  1. Take care in what you post
  2. Don’t go looking too far into the past of those you love
  3. Remember the purpose of your posts
  4. Don’t “fall in love with your own reflection”

At the intersection of the need for privacy and the desire to be remembered lies the wisdom of knowing what we want to be remembered for and the discipline of leaving only that as our digital tattoo. With technology now active in people’s’ lives from birth, today’s challenge is to use this wisdom for ourselves. We need to teach the value of discretion and privacy as foresight to our families and to those who are unwise in this regard.

Remember- think before you post! Be wary of the digital legacy you leave…

Happy Holidays and Peace to all,

Iris and her team at Memoirs Productions

It’s Time for Turkey and Storytelling this Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving is a special holiday – a day set aside for spending time with family and for giving thanks. Marking the beginning of what for some is the most hectic time of year, it’s a busy day filled with cooking turkey, Macy’s Parade and watching and/or playing football.

Perhaps the most important item on our long To-do list should be to take time at Thanksgiving to listen to our elders talk about family traditions and tell their stories. With today’s smartphones placed in the center of the dining table, it’s easy to either set up the video or voice memo (audio recording) options, or the StoryCorps app (see below) and then leave it running the whole time. Don’t forget to make sure it’s fully charged!

Preserving Family Stories

How do we get the conversation flowing? James (Jay) Hughes, renowned Family Consultant and author of Family Wealth: Keeping it in the Family and The Compact Among Generations, suggests going around the dining room table, starting with the youngest and moving up the family asking each person to share a story they remember of an older family member. When you think about that concept, the eldest telling a story of their elder to a grand or great-grandchild, can span and touch up to 250 years of a family’s history in a single sitting!

Around the Dining Room Table

Dave Isay, founder of StoryCorps (see our October Blog), believes that in these very conversations lies the bridge from the past to the future and with it a better understanding of who we are. This Thanksgiving, Isay aims to create a mass movement to capture the stories of elders (defined as 65+) across the US with The Great Thanksgiving Listen. He believes that recording the stories of this generation represents a wealth of wisdom and knowledge we can all benefit from and that must not be lost.

Once everyone has had their turn, invite elders to tell their own stories. If there’s hesitation or you’re unsure how to get started, Isay recommends asking the following questions in his TED article How to Unlock Your Family History:

 

  • What was your childhood like?
  • Tell me about the traditions that have been passed down through our family. How did they get started?
  • What are your most vivid memories of school?
  • How did you meet your spouse?
  • What piece of wisdom or advice would you like to share with future generations?

 

Isay and we at Memoirs believe it is question number 5 that is the most important. “This is the person speaking to the future – directly to their great-great-great-grandkids – and letting them know what they’ve learned,” he says. It is one thing to know we need to ‘live life without regret’ or that we need to ‘spend enough time with the people we care about the most’. It can be an entirely different thing to hear it from someone close to you. “Their answer might just shake you up,” Isay says.

Get in on the Action

Although The Great Thanksgiving Listen is aimed at encouraging high school students to interview an elder, we encourage everyone to get in on the action. All you need is your smartphone (fully charged!) and the StoryCorps app. Simply download and follow the prompts. After pressing record, listen. After all, a story unheard is as good as a story untold.

Wishing you blessings of health, happiness and loving family times this Thanksgiving and always,

Iris and her team at Memoirs Productions

 

Studies Show: Family Storytelling Reaps Lifelong Benefits

As the topic of preserving one’s legacy trends in mainstream media, at Memoirs Productions family storytelling is what it’s always been about. Our 15 years experience in pioneering the video-legacy field has revealed not only the value that the process has for the storyteller, but also the clear benefits it holds for the recipients.

The preservation of one’s stories and life wisdom should not begin at the end of one’s life experience, when one looks back and contemplates the journey and the meaning of it. Rather, the benefit of sharing first memories from childhood shared regularly at bedtime by Mom and Dad can be helpful to personal growth and maturity.

Telling Your Family Story Can Make Your Child a Better Person

Above and beyond the obvious benefits of parent-child bonding, as well as its portability and accessibility, the benefits that family storytelling holds for children is now being revealed through 25 years of research. The studies show the measurable positive effects that family storytelling has on a child’s persona.

To gain all that from reminiscing about the past and passing on the stories and lore of our family is remarkable. As The Atlantic article, What Kids Learn From Hearing Family Stories, describes so well: Books contain narratives, but only family stories contain your family’s personal narrative.”

famille  maisonWhile the reading of fiction helps improve adults’ ability to understand other people’s emotions, family storytelling benefits include higher self-esteem, a stronger concept of self, a more robust identity, better coping skills, and lower rates of depression and anxiety for the (grand)children. Family storytelling can help a child grow into someone who feels connected to the important people in his/her life. We hear about this often when we’re told that children watch their grandparent’s Memoirs’ production, over and over again.

So the next time you are putting your children or grandchildren to bed, follow up the fictional storybook read with a personal tale from your own life. The long term effects on your young family members will be remembered through their lifetime and help them tell their and your stories to future generations.

P.S. Happy Halloween! Please don’t forget to take pics of those cute costumes.

 

The 2015 TED Prize Awards an Act of Generosity and Love

Dave Isay has a big wish: to gather stories and create an archive of the wisdom of humanity. He is the Founder of StoryCorps whose mission is to provide people of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share and preserve the stories of our lives.” StoryCorps allows each one of us to discover that we truly matter. By preserving our stories in this way we become better people in the process.

storycorps grand central

© Storycorps

In 2003, three years after the founding of Memoirs Productions, StoryCorps opened a recording booth facilitated by a moderator in Grand Central Terminal in New York City. For one hour, one person would interview a loved one, asking any questions or recording the telling of life stories that are important to them. Upon completion, the participants received a CD-Rom of their conversation while a duplicate copy was sent to the US Library of Congress for permanent archival storage.

© Rochelle Hartman

© Rochelle Hartman

Over the past 11 years of their story gathering process, StoryCorps moderators have noticed a common thread among these recorded conversations. Regardless of the socioeconomic background of the participants, the stories all have common threads of kindness, decency, dignity and courage.

Isay’s advice to us is to gather the courage and ask some of life’s important questions and to take the time to listen to the poetry, wisdom and grace that are to be found in the words spoken by the storytellers. If not, we will likely regret losing this opportunity to preserve the personal history of loved ones.

2015 TED Prize

With Isay’s award of the million dollar 2015 TED Prize, StoryCorps is expanding the reach of its story-capturing and archiving process. An app currently in beta-testing has been created so that people can bypass the current process and record their stories wherever and whenever they wish. Once stored, the interview can simply be uploaded as a file for sharing with the Library of Congress archive.

The potential reach and impact of this new process fulfills Isay’s wish to let humanity know that every single life matters equally and infinitely.

We invite you to watch Dave Isay’s TED Talk Everyone around you has a story the world needs to hear by clicking here.

You may also download the app onto your smart phone or tablet and try it out today: https://storycorps.me/

 

P.S. If you don’t have time for the full TED talk, here’s Dave Isay’s intro to StoryCorps. We highly recommend learning more about this project! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGCD1XR0WPk

In FRONT(!) of a Camera: Memoirs Productions Featured in Wall Street Journal Video

We are honoured to have been interviewed ON camera and featured in a Wall Street Journal/Barron’s video: How to Preserve Your Family Legacy. As a follow-up to our interview in Barron’s PENTA earlier this year, The WSJ invited Iris Wagner and two of Memoirs’ New York based clients to their offices to be filmed.

It has been said that capturing family history on film/video is a new trend. In fact we at Memoirs are celebrating 15 years of providing excellence in legacy preservation this way, and the Association of Personal Historians was born 20 years ago and continues to thrive and grow.

We have received many lovely testimonials from the clients and families we serve as to the life affirming and transforming effects the Memoirs’ Experience has had on them. It was overwhelming to hear the heartfelt reflections of our two clients when the seasoned journalist interviewed them on their personal experiences. One of our clients interviewed, when asked about our process, said: I began to feel much more proud of my life and the adversity I’ve overcome and it was obvious this is the message for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”

1Click here to view the four minute video. It truly captures the essence of what Memoirs does everyday. Learn the impact that ethical wills and video biographies has on those who choose to preserve their legacy this way. Kindly let us know what you think and please share the link!

 

From the APH (Association of Personal Historians) Series: 20 Reasons Why You Should Write Your Family History

Written by Michelle Sullivan, APH
Video produced by Iris Wagner, Memoirs Productions
This post originally appeared on PersonalHistorians.org’s blog on August 13, 2015. Reproduced with permission.

 

J._H._Capp_family_reunion_group_portrait_1908_(3191507609)Typical, you might guess, for a New York Public Library list of 20 motivations to focus exclusively on books. When Carmen Nigro published her “20 Reasons Why You Should Write Your Family History” blog post, she left out some very important ways we can document our past, including video, audio, and digital. Veteran APH member Iris Wagner of Memoirs Productions in Montreal reminds us that there are many ways to produce our family history with a video entry to this week’s series instalment.

.Iris’ very special experience with clients at a large family reunion helps reinforce the idea behind Nigro’s 19th motivation: Family members and even distant cousins may become more forward in contributing documents, photos, and stories for your genealogical research. Key for genealogists, and for anyone interested in producing their own personal and family history.

 

About this 20-by-20 series:
Welcome to the fourth bonus feature blog post in APH’s successful series inspired by an article by Carmen Nigro of the New York Public Library entitled 20 Reasons Why You Should Write Your Family History. Bonus feature posts will either revisit one of the original 20 themes laid out in the NYPL post, or suggest additional reasons as to why individuals should consider recording their personal histories. Who better than APH members to enrich this already impressive list? Follow this compelling series of bonus posts, published every Thursday on the APH blog.

Up Close and Personal with Andre Agassi

Andre-AgassiWorld renowned professional tennis player Andre Agassi was simply charming when he spoke at C2MTL, an international business conference held in Montreal I attended earlier this summer highlighting commerce and creativity. Agassi’s talking points varied from his childhood and tennis career, covered in his 2010 bestselling book Open: An Autobiography, to his more recent philanthropic adventures in creating a charter school business model for disadvantaged students in his home town of Las Vegas.

The story of a remarkable life, Open is much more than a memoir of a tennis superstar. It explores how Agassi was often unhappy and unfulfilled despite his great on-court successes, and how he resented the sport that gave him fame and fortune. It clarifies that from birth to age 27, his life was entirely controlled by his moody and demanding father who instilled a relentless work ethic.

 

On Parenting

The interview at C2 took on the subject of his own parenting style. Father of two with wife Steffi Graf, Agassi explained he had made a conscious decision to parent his children differently from his own upbringing. He spoke passionately about how defining success is the first and most important decision you make as a parent.

Agassi defines his own vision of parental success as holding his kids accountable that “their days reflect the values and the things that they claim to love and want… that all their behaviors reflect what they claim. Don’t tell me something’s important to you – show me what’s important to you…I’m interested in how they live and engage with their life” he says.

“I’ll tell you when I stopped regretting anything as it links to my childhood,” Agassi said. “It’s when I get a chance to realize that I get to live and breathe my children’s childhood…I get the luxury of teaching my kids the things I have learned to be from my father and teaching my kids the things I learned that I didn’t want to be from my father.” Now that’s a true reflection on parenthood.

 

On Legacy

In 1994 Agassi founded the Andre Agassi Charitable Foundation which opened the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy in 2001 in Las Vegas and has an impressive 100% graduation rate. He has since taken the business model of the public charter school for at-risk children and created 65 more across the United States. He also has invested with entrepreneurial partners and is a board member of various businesses.

Although he retired from tennis in 2006, parenting, being an entrepreneur and devoting time to his foundation keep him more focused than ever. “What do I do in the morning? I get up and work.”

Some things never change.