There was an interesting article on the BBC website at the weekend about a journalist called Dan Johnson, who had recorded interviews with his father prior to his passing, from which he has subsequently made a personal version of Desert Islands Discs to remember him by. You can find the article at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-60084596.
By coincidence, on Sunday I started to transcribe interview sessions with my own father, recorded in mid-2020 prior to his passing almost a year ago. An uncle of mine passed away a week ago, and a cousin contacted me last week with some family photographs that I had not seen before, and I knew my father had discussed his brother in one of our sessions, hence the transcription effort to allow me to be able to share what had been said. (My father was quite elderly with an Ulster accent, and with my cousin being very much a Londoner, and not likely to understand many of the colloquial terms, the transcription seems to be a better option!). In this first session alone there were extraordinary stories about how my father was once sneaked into the very exclusive Annabel's club in London by my uncle, who was the doorman for a time after it first opened, stories about my father's naval experiences in Singapore and at a base in England, tales from his childhood in Carrickfergus, and much more. I have over two hours of recorded material still to work through, and it is a joy to hear his voice again. I had deliberately avoided doing so for the last year - his passing was all a bit too close still - but now is a perfect time to hear his voice again (although my wife got slightly startled last night when I played his voice on the computer, and she suddenly heard it out of the blue!).
I mentioned this on Twitter, and was asked how I had recorded this. Very easily - I simply sat my phone down on the table and recorded using the voice recorder app on it, and then moved the MP3 files to my computer (and onto back-ups - it's precious material). To make it feel less like a one-on-one inquisition, I also had my wife with me on some sessions, and even my kids were present on a couple of occasions, so that he had an audience to 'perform' to - he liked to tell stories (Paton thing!)!
Whenever interviewing someone, never make it feel like an ordeal, you can just keep the tech to a minimum, and there is no need to go in with formal questions that demand specific answers, but do have an idea of what you want to cover, and just steer the conversation along those lines. Don't even call it an 'interview' - just ask your parent or relative if they would mind talking about a particular aspect of the past that you are interested in if they have a few minutes, and let nature take its course if they agree! On a few occasions my Dad would veer off topic (sometimes hilariously so!), but I would always gently steer him back to where I wanted him to be. The effort was truly worth it.
Recording with a microphone is not the only way to try to capture such memories. My mother passed away a few years earlier in 2013, and I had not recorded her discussing her memoirs in the same way. However, I did once spend an afternoon with her, over a few cups of tea, filling in a 'grandparents book' that I had bought her a couple of years earlier, and which had just been gathering dust. She had been loathe initially to fill it in herself ("Och son, what do ye want to know all that for?!"), but I eventually talked her into it if I would do the writing - she agreed, and over a few cups of tea she started discussing her background, and would not stop!
Historic documents will only take you so far with ancestral research, but first hand testimony will get us much closer to our ancestors, how they thought, what made them laugh, even how they sounded, the idioms they used, the things that motivated them, and more. We may not have the chance to do so with relatives who have already passed, but if there is still a chance to do so with those still around, and a relative is willing to do so, you are looking a gift horse in the mouth if you don't at least try.
And when they have passed, as Dan Johnson noted in his account, it can be a comfort to hear their voices once again.
Chris
My new book Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records is now available to buy at https://bit.ly/IrishLandRecords. Also available - Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.
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