One of the joys of growing older is connecting with siblings and sharing family memories. My two sisters and I meet annually to re-connect, have fun creating works of felt art (at least we think that they are works of art 🙂), and talking about memories of our childhood.
In fact, this is an integral part of our 'felting sisters' week together every year. This is a fairly new tradition but one that I thoroughly enjoy as the designated family genealogist. I have spent years working on family trees and trying to find out as much as I can about the lives of our ancestors but I never really thought about recording my and my siblings memories. After all, I think I remember what happened and, besides, who would be interested anyway? But I am finally following all of the advice given in genealogy magazines, webinars and blogs about collecting family stories from immediate family. Last year I decided to use my trusty audio recorder to capture our conversation as we met together and a tradition was born!
Here is how I went about doing it. I decided to use a sound recorder so that I didn't have to worry about taking note. I also decided that it made sense to start at the beginning, so to speak, rather than just talking about key events - such as experiencing riots in Guyana! We moved a lot as children as our dad was transferred to new posts, so it made sense to me to break the stories into locations. So we first started talking about our memories of Belize where we were all born. As the youngest of my sisters, and having left Belize as a baby, I didn't have my own memories but I did remember stories that my mum or dad told me. So my instructions to my sisters were to share any personal memories we had or anything that older siblings or relatives had told us. We shared these stories over 4 sessions all saved on my audio recorder.
And there they sat for a year until the next 'felting sisters' week was almost upon me and I realised that I didn't even remember where we had left off in our stories. So I got out the recorder and decided to transfer the files to the software that came bundled with it. All of the files were saved with numeric file names corresponding to the date captured which was helpful but didn't really help me to know anything about the content of each audio file. So renaming the files with a name that told me something about the content was important. It was fairly easy to do this by listening to the beginning and end of each file to decide on a more descriptive name, basically the location and dates.
That was the first step in getting organized. Next I decided to transcribe the last recording that we did to refresh my memory of where we had reached. I also remembered that there were a few facts that I said I would check on but couldn't remember what they were. After all I had promised this a year ago!
Luckily, the software allowed me to transcribe from within it so that the written transcription and audio were linked together. Another bonus is the ability to set some transcribing parameters such as stop and start play back keys so I could press a key such as F10 to start and F11 to stop the audio playback as needed. I can touch type fairly fast, but not as fast as we can talk when we get together so this was a big help😏.
With the transcription completed, I was able check the items that I had promise to research - such as employment records of my dad to determine the dates we moved, as we weren't always sure just how long we stayed in one place when we were young. I was also able to check key events we discussed such as when the first moon landing occurred (July 20, 1969), and when we travelled by boat to Scotland to visit our grandparents (December, 1959).
In my next blog I will talk about how this years's 'felting sister's' weekend went and the great work we did sorting old family photos to complement our audio and transcribed stories.
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| One of my works of felt art created at our felting get-together |
In fact, this is an integral part of our 'felting sisters' week together every year. This is a fairly new tradition but one that I thoroughly enjoy as the designated family genealogist. I have spent years working on family trees and trying to find out as much as I can about the lives of our ancestors but I never really thought about recording my and my siblings memories. After all, I think I remember what happened and, besides, who would be interested anyway? But I am finally following all of the advice given in genealogy magazines, webinars and blogs about collecting family stories from immediate family. Last year I decided to use my trusty audio recorder to capture our conversation as we met together and a tradition was born!
Here is how I went about doing it. I decided to use a sound recorder so that I didn't have to worry about taking note. I also decided that it made sense to start at the beginning, so to speak, rather than just talking about key events - such as experiencing riots in Guyana! We moved a lot as children as our dad was transferred to new posts, so it made sense to me to break the stories into locations. So we first started talking about our memories of Belize where we were all born. As the youngest of my sisters, and having left Belize as a baby, I didn't have my own memories but I did remember stories that my mum or dad told me. So my instructions to my sisters were to share any personal memories we had or anything that older siblings or relatives had told us. We shared these stories over 4 sessions all saved on my audio recorder.
And there they sat for a year until the next 'felting sisters' week was almost upon me and I realised that I didn't even remember where we had left off in our stories. So I got out the recorder and decided to transfer the files to the software that came bundled with it. All of the files were saved with numeric file names corresponding to the date captured which was helpful but didn't really help me to know anything about the content of each audio file. So renaming the files with a name that told me something about the content was important. It was fairly easy to do this by listening to the beginning and end of each file to decide on a more descriptive name, basically the location and dates.
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| Sound Recorder Screen |
That was the first step in getting organized. Next I decided to transcribe the last recording that we did to refresh my memory of where we had reached. I also remembered that there were a few facts that I said I would check on but couldn't remember what they were. After all I had promised this a year ago!
Luckily, the software allowed me to transcribe from within it so that the written transcription and audio were linked together. Another bonus is the ability to set some transcribing parameters such as stop and start play back keys so I could press a key such as F10 to start and F11 to stop the audio playback as needed. I can touch type fairly fast, but not as fast as we can talk when we get together so this was a big help😏.
With the transcription completed, I was able check the items that I had promise to research - such as employment records of my dad to determine the dates we moved, as we weren't always sure just how long we stayed in one place when we were young. I was also able to check key events we discussed such as when the first moon landing occurred (July 20, 1969), and when we travelled by boat to Scotland to visit our grandparents (December, 1959).
In my next blog I will talk about how this years's 'felting sister's' weekend went and the great work we did sorting old family photos to complement our audio and transcribed stories.
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