Sunday, January 3, 2010

Preparation Sunday - Step 3 of 7

As the holidays come to a close, I hope they were especially good times for you to gather ANCESTOR STORIES. Over the span of seven Sundays, I will share with you my approach to preparing your ancestor stories to share with others. Before you can share, of course, you must have them and have them in a form to be useful to share and tell. [ See 13 Ways to Tell Your Ancestor Stories, for doing that]

If you are on Facebook, the 7 Steps of Preparation to TELL YOUR ANCESTOR STORIES are already available by joining the Cause: TELL YOUR ANCESTOR STORIES. I encourage you to join.
The 7 Steps are, very briefly: Ask, Listen, Record, Organize, Research, Write, Share.

In the last two weeks, we have talked of how to use Ask, Listen and Record all together over the holidays as family members get together at different times for different celebrations and events.

Our focus today is on Record, the third of the 7 Steps.

Each of us will use a different technique to record what we hear as family and others talk about our family history and our ancestors. Sometimes we must simply Listen carefully and do our best to remember the key elements of the discussion until we can actually write them down or enter them into our computer.

I hope that many of us at least had a pen or pencil and a notepad to take down critical new information at the time. That should also have allowed each of us to Ask some carefully considered questions, being careful not to interrupt the flow of the conversations in doing so. These notes then should be reviewed as soon as possible and a first edit done to begin to Organize the information and to compile a Research "To Do List."

If you were able to use a digital audio (or video) recorder, your next step is to transcribe that information to allow you to begin to Organize the information and to compile a Research "To Do List."

Please do your best to get right at making good use of the information you have gathered over the holidays to help you build your Ancestor Stories.

Families are Forever! ;-)

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the post. I had not seen you on Facebook. I have joined your cause hope some of my friends see it too.
    You are a great story teller. My goal is to purchase your book this year.
    Frances

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