Life & Biography Writing for Friends, Family History & As A Personal Historian

Some time ago, when I was devoting much time to researching my family tree, I produced some documents that I intended to use for information gathering purposes.

These were initially intended to serve as skeleton questionnaires for the interviewing of older family members and would inform both about the individual & hopefully prompt recollections of other, perhaps largely forgotten about ancestors. As is the norm, this initial idea quickly expanded and I thought about developing them further so that I might become a Personal Historian and produce biographies for others to leave for their own families.

With the development of Information Technology, the production and publication of professionally printed & bound biographies for the 'unfamous' is now available to many at reasonable cost.

Whilst I didn't take the project all the way to fruition at the time, save for one family member, a lot of hard work & a little plagiarism went in to the production of some pretty solid questionnaires amounting to in excess of 400 questions. Many of these serve well as prompts for supplementary questions that enable a deeper insight into a life story.

Have you started or thought about putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard & immediately got stuck? We all have those moments when a long forgotten memory suddenly springs into our consciousness & lives again. This will often happen during a conversation but is frequently triggered by sensory stimuli. To aid recall, consider trying to aid the recall process sights, sounds & smells fom your past.

Sights might include that box of old photographs in the attic, some cine film (which is easily converted to digital these days), an old movie you watched or a visit to a gallery etc.

Sounds could be a favourite piece of music from your youth, the clackety-clack of a railroad, a ship's horn in the harbour or something from the natural world.

Smells that are useful include those of food cooking. Consider preparing something that grandma used to make you. Or, maybe it's flowers or pine-cones or a camomile lawn or the fish market or an open fire.

If there are any readers who would like assistance with writing, proof reading and/or publishing their own life stories, please use the contact form to the right of this page & I will be happy to help.

Alternatively, I can email you copies of the structured questionnaire & some more handy hints and advice. If they are of use and any value to you and you are financially able a click on the donate button to the right would be greatly appreciated. I would wish you well anyway with your endeavours.