Real Life Drama in Video Memoirs

You don't need to turn on the History Channel to see the impact the dramatic events of the 20th century have had on ordinary people's lives.

Many of our video biography and video memoir subjects lived through the climactic times: The Depression, Pearl Harbor, WWII and the Holocaust, Mass Immigration, the Cold War - and more recently the social turmoil of the 1960s, Vietnam and the Watergate crisis. I find that the children are almost always curious about those times - often more interested than our subjects expect!

This is, of course, history personally experienced.


Take Marvin Yarin. In 1944, at the age of 18, Marvin joined the invasion forces in Europe. GIs like Marvin were not expected to live long or to survive serious injury. And, being Jewish, capture by the Germans carried special risk. But he survived unhurt and returned home through Bremerhaven - the very same port his grandparents left when coming to America in 1881!

The shocking events of world history are written in the memories of many of our parents, our friends, our neighbors, and also our selves. And increasingly, folks are preserving these stories in video memoirs. These stories - as well as ordinary family traditions - can only be kept alive through the children, and then their children. Alyce Doney's roots are Armenian, and she keeps alive the story of the terrible genocide - as well as happier memories like her mother's cooking.



The urge to preserve our life stories is as old as civilization. Until recently, the options were limited to personal memoirs and talking on tape. Now, we have video biography and video memoirs. The ability to make affecting, affordable, A&E-style life story videos about ordinary people is a wonderful boon to our subjects and their families and a solemn privilege for Your Story Here.

Not every video memoir involves high drama. Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans - as John Lennon famously said. And hearing ordinary family stories of coping with life in earlier decades can be just as riveting as more difficult stories. Take the 1950s - it was a decade of promise and fabulous growth tainted by Cold War tensions and exploding social and racial unrest, and most of our parents were witnesses to it all: Video Memoir: The Fabulous 50s".

Video memoirs give us a chance to record for ourselves the kinds of stories that we watch on the History Channel. And for those enterprising enough, you can gather ancillary material like archive images and footage to help tell the story. And while a lot of historical material is protected from use by the Copyright laws - not all of it is. For more information about including other material into your video memoir or life story video: Life Story Video and Copyright Issues.

Good luck!