The Memory Books

[madwriter]

This was something I'd been considering doing for some weeks now, but some circumstances made me decide to get cracking on this last week

Comments

[alexfiles]

That's very cool. I've been trying to record my mother's stories about our family. Initially I took my laptop over and captured them while she spoke, but I had to stop; she kept editing herself as if she were writing a story in third person! Now I listen and then rush home to my laptop and jot it all down. (Truman Capote was right, memory and conversation is better than taping or note-taking.) Further complicating the attempt is her memory, which has been slightly reorganized by a stroke. I have to rack my own memories and those of my sister and other relatives to see if what she says tallies with what we recall. But I love doing it

[madwriter]

The frustrating thing to me now is that I was asking all kinds of family history questions as a teenager, but still didn't really know what to ask. Heck, even though my grandmother was always willing to talk to me about our family, I know more about her mother's siblings now, thanks to the Internet, than I ever learned by talking to her--simply because I didn't think to ask.

I'm also now getting a real appreciation for overwhelming the Memory Book project is. :) I just wrote my longest entry by far, 4500 words, over the course of this afternoon: trying to compress seven years of 1980's memories of camping at Smith Mountain Lake into a few pages. I know I'll be adding stuff here and there until the books are turned over to the Kiddies, but still, it's a lot more daunting than I imagined.