Читать книгу Start & Run a Personal History Business - Jennifer Campbell - Страница 4

When I tell people I’m a personal historian, sometimes I hear, “A what?” or, “Like, you do genealogy?” After a quick explanation — “Well, genealogy and personal history are related fields,” — I explain that I help people tell their life stories and publish them in heirloom books for their families and future generations. Within a minute, they’re telling me about a relative who’s led such an interesting life who really should do his memoirs. Or, sadly, about a relative who just passed away and used to tell great stories but no one got a chance to write them down, and now that branch of the family has lost its history. It seems everyone knows somebody who needs a personal historian.

What does a personal historian do? A personal historian steps into other people’s lives for a brief, intense time, asking questions about their background, ancestors, events, and experiences that shaped their lives, relationships, foibles, struggles, accomplishments, regrets, highlights, and low lights — whatever memories, thoughts, feelings, and reflections they wish to talk about and have preserved. In a typical book project, a personal historian guides a person through the telling of his or her life’s stories (or some aspect of his or her life) for a number of hours, records the interviews, transcribes word-for-word, and organizes, edits, and rewrites the transcripts into a polished narrative. Once the manuscript is completed, photos and memorabilia can be added to enhance the story, and everything is laid out in book form and published for the author, his or her family, and friends.

In Start & Run a Personal History Business, space dictates that I focus only on personal history books, but these “how-to” guidelines and practices can be applied to a wide variety of products and formats, from audio or video recordings, books, quilts and art collages, to multimedia presentations on DVD. See Chapter 15 about some of the exciting possible ways to capture and preserve memories.

Personal historians preserve not only life stories, but also the histories of businesses, towns, families, places of worship, organizations, special-interest groups and ethnic groups, or groups such as veterans or hospice patients. Not everyone calls themselves a personal historian: there’s the corporate (or business) historian, community historian, public historian, legacy writer, biographer, memoir writer, ghostwriter, and oral historian, to name a few. A videobiographer is another professional in the field, using a camera and sophisticated equipment and software. Editors and coaches work on memoirs that are already written or are being written. Workshop leaders teach memoir writing. Others specialize in photograph restoration, archiving, writing obituaries, delivering eulogies (as “funeral celebrants”), graphic design, printing, and binding.

What these professions have in common is a passion for preserving the past. I hope that Start & Run a Personal History Business ignites that passion in you, too.