Читать книгу Start & Run a Personal History Business - Jennifer Campbell - Страница 6

In the past 15 years, interest in memoirs, genealogy, and family history has exploded. Memoirs consistently dominate the bestseller lists, and not just those written by celebrities (or their ghostwriters). People are reading memoirs of everyday people, like Frank McCourt with his Pulitzer-prize winning memoir, Angela’s Ashes. No longer are memoirs only written by the elderly. The midlife memoir is quite common and, as I was writing this book, two American Idol contestants, barely out of their teens, were reported to be writing their memoirs. Like peeking into someone’s diary, we are fascinated with other people’s lives; the appeal of the memoir crosses all economic, geographic, racial, ethnic, and age segments.

Along with reading about other people’s lives comes the passionate pursuit of writing about our own. Historically, writing one’s reminiscences was reserved for the elite; stories of everyday people, especially marginalized factions like the poor or women, were largely lost. Today there is a groundswell of memoir writers, meeting in libraries, church basements, and online to support each other as they document their experiences and pass them down to future generations. Thousands of websites are also devoted to the memoir genre.

Genealogy — tracing your family history through your ancestors — is said to be the most popular pastime in North America and many other parts of the world. Largely thanks to the Internet, enthusiasts are almost obsessively researching their roots and discovering their lineage. At the time of writing this book, the Ancestry.com and Ancestry.ca websites have more than one million members and hundreds of thousands of forums. Television programs like Ancestors in the Attic and Who Do You Think You Are? attract millions of viewers. And following close on the heels of genealogy is the incredibly popular hobby of scrapbooking. All these trends — memoirs, genealogy, and scrapbooking — are about capturing “momentous memories”: the moments and times of our lives that are meant to be shared with those close to us, now and in the future.

But what’s behind this phenomenon?