Video Biography Central

Old Photos Give Up Their Secrets

2011-12-07T09:10:00.000-08:00

Choosing a photo for this year's Your Story Here holiday card, I came across this old Library of Congress image: "Poor children playing on sidewalk, Georgetown, Washington, D.C."

I have walked the streets of Georgetown, and the houses still look very similar - although their prices have risen quite a bit. (The poor now have to go somewhere else to be poor.)
This photograph was taken in 1935 by Carl Mydans, for the US Farm Security Administration.

I first thought that the image was showing children admiring a Christmas present toy (that was the kind of thing I was searching for after all). But the date stated by the LOC for its creation or publication (September 1935) suggests otherwise, and the kids' clothing proves it was definitely not December.

How did the image come to be created?

As part of FDR's New Deal, FSA photographers fanned out across the country to document the plight of the poor in America. The images captured then have now entered our consciousness as defining the Depression. And those images - or 165,000 of them at least - are now housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. Every last one of them can be looked at on-line.

Can you imagine a bigger treasure?

What strikes the modern viewer most about the image above is the total absorption of the children in the simple wooden toy. (It's hard to tell, but it looks like a figure on a horse that can be pulled along on wooden wheels.) The children are almost reverential in their regard for the object - as if they are nervous about touching it.

And it doesn't plug in, you may be thinking.

Many of the FSA images from the 1930s targeted the rural poor. As well as the financial meltdown, the loss of jobs and the collapse of demand, many rural areas also had to cope with drought and the legacy of over-farming. The resulting "Dust Bowl" across the Great Plains threw thousands of families off the land and led to a wave of intra-continental migration, particularized by John Steinbeck in his "Grapes of Wrath".
Dust Bowl images don't work quite as well as Holiday images. (I know even less of the above farm photograph, which was taken between 1935 and 1944, and is "uncaptioned" in the Library of Congress records.)

Not much else is known about the image of those Georgetown children. But the economy did recover, eventually. Too young to have been involved in WWII, most of them would easily have found jobs in the post war boom. (Discrimination, which held many back, should not have been a factor for these white children.) And if these kids had survived the Korean conflict (several of the boys would certainly have been caught up in the "Selective Service" military draft which started in 1948) then their economic lives should have improved immeasurably over their parents' - with the general prosperity of the 1950s.

The children of these Georgetown ragamuffins should also have fared well enough (comparatively anyway). It remains to be seen though how the grandchildren of these Georgetown tykes will weather the storm of our current economic woes. They will have more toys than their grandparents ever did, toys that do plug in, but they may have a less rosy future.

Let's all hope that the New Year rings in a turnaround in the fortunes of this great country.

And keep in mind that it's not just historical images that give up their secrets with a careful viewing. Every image I see, be it as a part of my video biography business - or as part of my more recent foray into photo restoration - contains a universe of information within its borders.

Technical note: The Georgetown image above is pretty much as it appears in the LOC archive (aside from the text which many may say now defaces it!).

I did remove some rubbish that was gathered at the kids' feet, and I obviously colored the toy to make it jump out. I also lightened the area surrounding the toy to separate it even further. Lastly, I added a slight sepia tint. (I beg the indulgence of the original photographer Mr. Mydans, one of this country's greatest photographers who passed away in 2004, who had no such tomfoolery at his disposal.)

Jane Lehmann-Shafron is a video biographer who co-founded Your Story Here LLC Video Biography a video production company that specializes in preserving family history. Based in Orange County CA, she was recently featured in the national women's magazine "Woman's World" and her award-winning films have been screened in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted on 949-742-2755 or through her website.

Telling Stories, Saving LivesA Video Biographer's Beginning

2011-11-05T17:15:00.001-07:00

I was asked recently about how I got into the business of video biographies.

Well, it's kind of a long story...

Diagnosed with a modest cancer in 2005, my first reaction was to learn my father's story. My husband knew my story – if anything bad should happen. But only I could introduce my young sons to their dead grandfather.

The surgery and treatment were an ordeal, but nothing like what my dad went through with his liver cancer. And my life, I learned, was nothing like what he went through: the Depression, being sent from home to work for food, war in the Pacific, no education, an explosion of bewildering, post war change.

“We had it good”, he used to say. “I feel sorry for you kids.” It made me smile to remember that. I think the same thing about myself and my own kids. Whatever happened, I had it good. I knew that.

I have a photo – one of his last ever. He's holding one of my two, then two year old sons (they're both off to college next year). Dad is almost all gone, nothing like the bull-chested rugby player of his war years. But I don't cherish this photo. He is so diminished.

I spent a lot of the next 6 months reminiscing – about his life and my own. And with the help of my husband – who was pleased I had a hobby (although no hair) – I made a documentary about his life.

My dad would not be a stranger to his grandsons.

Up to that point, I had been an attorney. And a mother. Now I glimpsed a new calling. A video biographer was emerging.

My first real client was Anne King. Anne also had cancer. When I arrived at her home in Glendale, she was very grey and frail. She barely had a voice. I was anxious that I wouldn't get any part of her story. But as the day progressed, and while the camera ingested my questions and Anne's answers, she bloomed.

Her best years were her World War II years. “We all had the same purpose”, she said. (Looking at Anne's home movies of her 9 year old self jumping rope in the 1930s made me think that those must have been pretty good years too...)

My husband and I both cried when we got a call one week later that Anne had died.

I have learned since that there is a branch of elder care called “reminiscence therapy”. Talking about old times with the help of objects, photographs and even music has actually improves mood, wellbeing, communication and has even been found to stimulate memory in Alzheimer's patients. A recent study (in the Journal of Psychology and Aging (2010) Vol. 25, No. 1, 157–167) found that these benefits were particularly enhanced when the reminiscing occurred with others.

Anne's documentary was a comfort to the whole family – especially her husband who, reluctant to be a subject himself, watched his wife - daily - for months after.

Since Anne King, I have interviewed hundreds of people as a professional video biographer – most of them in their seventies or older. And while I can't be sure that I have added any days to those lives, I am certain that for my subjects and for their families, telling their stories has saved their lives.

The toughest jobs are when I am called in, but just a too late. I, and the family, have to live with the thought that we almost created a little piece of immortality

Telling my dad's story helped save his life, and gave new meaning to my own.

Audio Cassettes to CD: Digitizing Old Family History Tapes

2011-09-20T11:16:00.000-07:00

If you have old - and priceless - family history audio cassettes then you probably want to make digital copies.

Doing that, you can edit the audio and turn it into a CD, or add the tracks to your iTunes library and your iPod/iPad, or use the audio in a larger family history project, or email the audio files around to the cousins, or make a ringtone even.

And that's what I am going to help you with today (not the ringtone though).

And good luck!I have transferred a lot of audio cassettes to CD over the years in the course of my video biography business. Usually, a member of the family sat down with Mom or Dad (or grandma or grandpa) 20 or 30 years ago and recorded a conversation. The tape then went into a drawer or a box. Then the technology revolution happened.

So, now we need to get the thing into the computer. Even better, we want to clean it up a bit, separate and name the tracks, and publish it around. Now while I am not an audio expert, I do have a technique and some tips that might help you out with your old family history audio cassettes.

Tip: Some people seem to have a phobia about handling tapes (audio or video). The truth is that tape is a pretty good place for data storage (issues of eventual tape degradation aside). The reason? Even if they break or become unspooled, tapes can usually be fixed and respooled. If the shell becomes broken, that can easily be replaced.

So, here's my process:

1. Protect your family history audio recording
First, before anything else, prise out those tabs at the top of the cassette. You will probably need a small screw driver to get the things to bust off. It seems wrong, because it requires you to actually break off the little plastic tab. But that's what it's there for. Truly.

Once you have done that (or if the tabs are missing already) it means that the audio cassette cannot be accidentally taped over. Having an open hole prevents tape players from engaging their taping mechanisms. (If you ever want to record again, just apply some tape to cover the hole.)

Tip: Some types of cassette have a slider that you can just move across for protection against accidental over-taping.

2. Connect your tape player to your computer
Now, you will need to insert your audio cassette into your tape player then move the player close to your computer. Because we are going to play the tape into the computer through a cable.

To do that we simply run a 1/8th inch stereo audio connector from your tape player's headphones' jack to the "line-in", "audio-in" or "mic" port on your computer. (If you can't see it, take a look at the back of your computer.)

Once connected, your clever computer will then be able to convert the analog audio signals to digital signals and write a file.

Tip: If you have a choice, use the best quality tape player you have. The smaller, portable, battery-powered tape players have a tendency to snag your tape.

3. Open up your audio editing software
If you don't have any audio editing software installed, then you may want to try the free program "Audacity".

Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

Over here at Your Story Here Family History Video, we use Apple's Soundtrack Pro to import our family history audio.

Tip: Take the time to set your "preferences" so that the files that you create on transfer end up somewhere that you can easily find them!

Whatever software you choose, check the settings to make sure that the program knows which port to listen to. Some computers, for example, have a digital input and an analog input and you may need to tell the computer which one you wish to select (the latter).

Once selected, press the record button on the software then press play on the tape player and stand back!

4. Check your recording levels
Actually, rather than standing back, you may want to lean in. Because now you will want to check to make sure the sound levels don't go into the red. If they do, it means that your recording levels are too high and you will get clipping and distortion.

Similarly, if you notice that your audio waveform is cut off - shown on the right as the green graph - then you should adjust your recording levels down. And the reverse if the graph looks too flat.

Take your time. There will almost certainly be some trial and error involved. Don't be afraid to scrap the session and start over.

5. Clean up the audio
Most family history audio recordings I have transferred over the years have come with a lot of static and background noise. In truth, there is just not a whole lot that can be done with compromised audio.

Your audio editing software should let you do some basic noise cleanup though. You should, for example, be able to set a "noise print" then adjust the parameters to minimize the sounds occurring in that range. The price for this "fix" can be some distortion, so don't go overboard.

Tip: If the audio is just too hard to understand due to noise - or due to accents maybe - and you are planning to use the audio in a family history video, go ahead and use it anyway - but provide subtitles when you do the video editing.

6. Break your audio into tracks
OK, this is where things get exciting. Now you have the family history audio file, you can start to make some sense of it.

Give the audio a careful listen, then decide where you want to break it up. If the recording was of a series of questions and answers, then the start of each question is an obvious break point.

Use your audio editing software to cut the tracks into manageable portions. If you have the Quicktime player, you can also cut audio into tracks with it, using the "trim" command.

I normally use Final Cut Pro to edit my raw audio into tracks - even though it's really for video. Maybe I'm just more used to it than Soundtrack Pro (which seems to involve more steps to achieve the same effect). In Final Cut, it's just a matter of setting "in" points and "out" points then exporting to a folder as an AIFF file.

Tip: Try to use descriptive, engaging, even amusing, titles for your tracks. These names will be the "song titles" when you come to burn a CD.

7. Make an audio CD in iTunes
Ever made an audio CD - your kids know how even if you don't! It's very simple: Open up iTunes, import your audio tracks (File > Add to Library) create a play list of your imported tracks (File > New Playlist - then drag the songs into the empty window) and finally: File > Burn Playlist to Disk.

Tip: You will be burning your tracks to a CD, which holds around 770MB of data, so if you have too much audio you will need to either re-export it with greater compression or just create a second playlist and a second CD.

For the advanced player, iTunes has an option whereby you submit your track names to their data base (Advanced > Submit CD Track Names) and whenever someone imports your CD into their iTunes library, the names drop in (Advanced > Get Track Names).

Now, if you still have energy after that, make yourself a CD case insert!

Family Trees & Family Video Biography

2011-08-20T14:35:00.000-07:00

I like to think of myself as a forester in the Woods of Family Trees.

A "forester"? Sure: "A person in charge of a forest or skilled in planting, managing, or caring for trees". That's me - I help care and preserve family trees!

Take one of our recent family video biography projects titled "New Lives in America". As some readers may know, it's about a pair of East Coast, mid-century Irish immigrants with a large and ever-growing, loving family.

Loretta and Thomas have been living in America for over 50 years now. They have put down roots: friends, church, houses and homes, and pensions now too. And a thriving garden - between winters. And children - and grandchildren - lots of both.

They have so much history around New York and New Jersey. So much history so close to home. But also so much history so far from home. In Ireland. Far and away.

Loretta's family were Irish rebels
Back in Ireland, Loretta's family fought the English, then saw the Easter Proclamation become fully-fledged Irish independence in 1921. Over here, her son Tom has learned the bagpipes and now proudly plays the "Wearing of the Green" in St Patrick's Day parades.

"So if the color we must wear be England's cruel red
Let it remind us of the blood that Irishmen have shed
And pull the shamrock from your hat, and throw it on the sod
But never fear, 'twill take root there, though underfoot 'tis trod."

They have some stories, Loretta and Thomas. A lot behind and a lot in front of them.

"One glance history" - the family tree
History behind and history in front - in "New Lives in America" all converging around two people, Thomas and Loretta. It's hard to imagine a better way to show all that history than with a family tree. So - as part of the family video biography project - that's exactly what we made.
See all those green tiles on the left? They're all great grandparents. And that's Ireland.

See all those green tiles on the right? They're all grand children, and that's America. Everybody converging around Thomas and Loretta.

There are some gaps. Despite some research, we couldn't fill in every tile. But that's really in the nature of family trees. You are going to have gaps. And who knows? Over time, the names will probably appear as other members of the family pick up the mantle and dig a little deeper.

Tom had his family tree printed into a poster and set it up for the family reunion. As well as the personal information, we incorporated birth and marriage documents and photographs. We used an historical map of Ireland as the background for the family tree (and triple checked every date!).

An immigrant story
Loretta became a citizen while she was still living in Brooklyn and working at the bank. She had been in the country for all of a year and a half. She became one more of nearly 8 million Irish people who, over the centuries, have made new lives in America.

Husband Thomas was another drop in that enormous human bucket. He became a citizen in 1955 while he was still serving in the US army. He had been in the country a bare 16 months.

How could they be so sure?

That's not a question easily answered, as I found out when I interviewed Thomas and Loretta for their family video biography earlier this year.

Someone who has never changed countries can never really understand the conflict that arises: The excitement of a new life mixed with the sadness of separation from family, friends and place.

The passing of the years, the making of new family and friends and the passing of the old helps ease the transition. But the tinge of conflict never fully goes away.

One thing is certain, leaving Ireland they both made better lives over here than would ever have been possible in Leitrim and Donegal.

Shades of Angela's Ashes?
Hard lives in Ireland, success in America? Frank McCourt and Angela's Ashes you may be thinking: Poor Irish childhoods, repressive Catholic schools, demon drink a perennial presence, more kids than you could possibly imagine cramped into tiny row houses. Death betimes.

Loretta winces when you mention Angela's Ashes. Too close to the bone? Too far from it? Overly dramatic? Made up from whole cloth? Loretta was raised on a farm, not in town. Her father was no drunk. Maybe she just doesn't see the parallels. But there is more to it than just that. She can be enigmatic, Loretta. Beauty and intrigue.

An ancient story
In historical terms, Loretta and Thomas they are pretty recent immigrants. Loretta even arrived on a plane - how modern can you get?

But Loretta and Thomas's story is also an ancient one. It's the story of hopeful people the world over trying to break the mold; trying to create new lives in a new land.

Thomas and Loretta's "New Lives in America" family video biography was conceived by son Tom. He has been interested in his Irish roots for some time, and even took his parents back there last year and filmed them in their villages and around their childhood haunts in Leitrim and Donegal. We were able to combine that with Tom's genealogical research, interviews, footage of Thomas and Loretta visiting old stomping grounds, as well as images, music and other material.

So, an ancient story with new avatars. "New Lives in America" is a family video biography like many others we have made. It is also unique. And the family tree tells the whole story at a glance.

Your Story Here family video biographies: Saving lives, one video at a time.

Jane Lehmann-Shafron is a video biographer who co-founded Your Story Here LLC Family Video Biography, a video production company that specializes in all genres of video biography. Based in Orange County CA, she was recently featured in national women's magazine "Woman's World" and her award-winning films have been featured in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted on 949-742-2755 or through her website.

Maps in Personal Documentary Video: Tell a Story With Historical Maps

2011-07-30T14:42:00.000-07:00

It's hard to imagine a personal documentary or family history video which cannot be enhanced by the inclusion of detail from historical or even current maps. But what is the best way to incorporate maps in our family history documentary projects?

Have you seen Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca lately? The film opens with the credits appearing over a map of Africa while a stylized version of La Marseillaise plays. We then dissolve to a shot of the globe, rotating, as we slowly move in towards North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. Voice-over tells us:

With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas. Lisbon became the great embarkation point. But not everybody could get to Lisbon directly, and so, a tortuous, roundabout refugee trail sprang up.

Now we see a map of France with Paris at its center and a line being drawn south to Marseilles then across the Mediterranean Sea. As the camera pulls back we get a partial-opacity overlay of refugees crossing a bridge. The voice-over continues:

Paris to Marseilles, across the Mediterranean to Oran, then by train, or auto, or foot, across the rim of Africa to Casablanca in French Morocco.

Then we cross-fade to a Moroccan minaret and are told that the next step for hapless refugees is purloining an exit visa to Lisbon which is the launching point for America. It is exit visas, and Rick's (Humphrey Bogart's) decision once he comes into possession of two of them, which drives the plot of Casablanca.

Now that's how you use maps in film!

Lessons from the Classics

OK, it's not the only way, but you can do worse than to study the classics. So, what are the lessons for the personal documentary or family history video maker?

First, maps are a great way to locate your story. They are like an establishing shot telling the viewer where the action will take place. Normally you would use a wide shot of a town or a house or building, but in family history documentary you don't always have even that. So a map can be a great place to start.

Second, you can use maps to show travel from one place to another. In Casablanca, we have a line that starts in Paris and ends up in Morocco. If your story is an immigration story, revealing lines from Europe to New York Harbor to the Midwest (say) is a great way to show an ancestor's journey.

How do you create lines in video? Simple. Just draw the line across your map in Photoshop (red is always a good color) then import the image into your editing suite as two layers. Use your motion tab to crop the line-image layer then key-frame the crop setting to make the line reveal itself! (There are also some line-creation plug-ins you can buy.)

Third, you can create powerful blended effects using maps overlain with video or graphics. Casablanca does this by combining maps with film images of refugees.

How do you create blended images in video editing? I'm sure it is a lot easier now than it was in 1942! The easiest way is to create a second layer of video and adjust its opacity. A more dramatic alternative is to play with the blending or "composite" options and see what works best (in Final Cut Pro select the layer then the commands are: Modify > Composite Mode > then choose an item from the menu ("overlay' is a personal favorite)).

At the very end of Casablanca, I think Rick surprises himself by his decision about what to do with the exit visas. Incorporate maps into your personal documentary and you might find you surprise yourself!

Jane Lehmann-Shafron is a video biographer who co-founded Your Story Here LLC Personal Documentaries, a video production company that specializes in preserving family history. Based in Orange County CA, she was recently featured in national women's magazine "Woman's World" and her award-winning films have been featured in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted on 949-742-2755 or through her website.

Sharing Your Family History Video II: The Screening

2011-07-01T16:12:00.000-07:00

Most of my “DIY” tagged blogs focus on the process of creating your family history video. This blog and the last one (A Note on Video Formats) assume you have finished your masterwork and are now ready to unleash it upon the world.

(Why worry about video formats? Well, where you decide to play your project will have consequences for the format you output to – hence my last blog Sharing Your Family History Video I.)

This week I am talking about a live screening – in front of an audience (cue applause).

I always encourage my clients to host a live screening of the finished project. It's a great chance to get a bunch of family and friends over to watch the documentary. Most people I know choose an evening (rather than a day on the weekend – I'll tell you why in a sec.), send out invitations (increasingly “evite” and similar), provide snacks and drinks, and then crank up the projector!

There's nothing like watching a family history video project with an audience. It's a whole new dynamic: Humorous parts that may have caused a smile before, now get laughs, sad bits often draw tears, and the life's hard decisions gain understanding and often admiration. There's always animated discussion following and friendship and family bonds are almost always deepened by the shared experience.

So, no arguments, it's a great idea to host a live screening. Let's get down to specifics.

Projection Equipment
A lot of my projects are created especially for an occasion – like a 50th wedding anniversary, a 70th or 80th birthday, or a multi-state family reunion – where there may be upwards of a hundred people. So I like to project the life story onto a big screen for maximum impact!

To do this you will need a screen, a projector, some speakers, and a lap top computer to play the video (either from a DVD or a video file on the computer's hard drive).

Projectors can be a little pricey, so unless you already own one, it may not be too cost effective to go out and buy one. The good news is that almost every workplace office has a projector that you should be able to borrow; failing that you can hire projectors for the night. (Grab a screen while you are at it – they are much cheaper to hire than projectors and you can get the stand-alone kind that just pops up from the floor.)

For sound, you should be able to hijack an existing sound system in the house and just route the audio from the lap top to the speakers (using a one-eighth stereo to dual (RCA) cable maybe).

If you decide to project, choose a room that you can darken. If that's too hard, then hold the screening at night - so much more cinematic. (The color tone and picture quality of projected video is miles better in a darkened room.)

HD Televisions
With TVs getting bigger and better, you can also play your family history video on a flat screen TV. You will need to get the video into the TV, and to do that you can just pop in a DVD into whatever machine you use at home for that (DVD player, X-box, PlayStation, etc).

You can also connect a device like a laptop or an iPad direct to the HD TV using an HDMI cable. HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) cables are simple and super-high quality - and they are taking over the world. While a lot of older machines don't have the slot, almost every new device does (Tip: HDMI cables are about half to a third of the price if you buy on-line!).

Going Off-Site
About half the time, my clients play their family history video at a function house for their (party) audience. (More rarely, they hire a small cinema.) Sometimes they bring their own equipment and sometimes they rely on the house.

A word of warning. If you are going to permit a function house to handle the projection arrangements, get there well ahead of time (ideally, a day or two before) and carry out a dry run. My experience has been that more often than not something is messed up – from blown projector bulbs and broken connections from central control, to bad audio, incorrect aspect ratios, and guys who just don't know how to operate the technology they have been put in charge of.

And make sure you bring a spare copy (or two) of the video – think redundant systems!

What to expect
With a bit of luck, the night is a smashing success and there are lots of laughs and perhaps some crying.

Be ready for your critics – if you have interviewed a number of people for the project, some may be a little grumpy with their (or their spouse's) allotted screen time! Screenings with family often bring suggestions, corrections, and even new material. (“You didn't have any photos of Grandma Joan? I have her old album at home...”) .

Suggestions, corrections and new material are great, but also a problem. Are you going to re-edit? Well, if you have the project all set up somewhere accessible (like Final Cut Pro) then it's really not a big deal to go in and add the new material. And with that new material now included, you can send out copies of the project to everyone who is interested. With that in mind, it is sometimes best to make and hand out bulk copies after (not at) the screening.

You have put in so much work to get you family history video made. Give it a proper launch with a public screening.

Sharing Your Family History Video I: A note on video formats

2011-05-28T09:04:00.000-07:00

So far, a lot of the practical-oriented advice on this blog has been directed to planning and producing your family history video. But if you are done, or close to being done, what are you going to do with the thing?

Well, this is where things get really exciting, because the viewing choices for your family history or genealogy video are almost limitless. And if you want to appeal to the younger generation, you may need to think a little more creatively than the old standby - the DVD.

Now if you are going to play in the new digital media world, you will want to understand just a few little things about video formats. Because depending on where you decide to play your family history video - an iPad or Facebook maybe - you might have to make some choices and trade-offs.

A word on formats
Last week our suburb held a community garage sale. One of the items on offer was a pair of video glasses - put them on, plug in a video cable, and enjoy the show just an inch from your eyeballs!

OK. They were a little kooky and I'm pretty sure they're not the wave of the future.

But our modern world does give us an array of viewing options, many of which are fun and practical. The good news is that every one of the new viewing options can be dialed up by a simple change of format.

Most varieties of display (gadget, web hosting site, whatever) are pretty forgiving. If you have a video file on your computer, it will often upload or play on a device if you simply connect to the site or plug the player into the computer and drag it across. And if that's your situation, stop reading now.

But some sites and some devices can be particular. For example, I once encountered problems uploading videos to two different web hosting services when I used uncompressed audio in the "PCM" format. Who knew? It was just the audio format that my editing program had on the top of its list.

And my new cell phone can play video, but I don't have a lot of storage space. So I like to downsize my videos first.

Changing the attributes of your video
So, you may need to alter an attribute of your video format to make it play or to ensure you don't hog more space on the device than you need to. What then are some of the video format features that you can change?

Your family history video, any video really, has 5 main attributes:

1. Size (in pixels) - standard definition TV is 720 x 480 pixels, full HD is 1920 x 1080, normal YouTube is 640 x 360. Any video can be shrunk to fit a small screen - and you will save storage space by doing so. Video can also be expanded, but the quality will always suffer.

A lot of mobile devices boast that they can play HD video. Think carefully if you really need an HD picture size (and an HD file size) on a very small screen. (The position may be different if you want to use the device as a player for an HD TV.)

2. Frame rate - i.e. the number of frames flashed on a display screen per second. It's usually 30 for standard definition video; 60 for HD; and 24 frames per second for cinema.

You can reduce video frame rates to 20 or 15 fps if you want to keep the video file small - but the movie may look a little jumpy. Where file size is critical, you can make a big reduction by reducing your video frame rate.

It helps to know a thing or two about what's under the hood of your family history video.
3. Data or Bit Rate: If frame size is like the diameter of a pipe, data or bit rate is the speed of the flow. A standard DVD pushes pictures onto the screen at an average of around 7Mbps (megabits per second); a YouTube video may use 2 or 3Mbps; HD video may be 25Mbps.

You can adjust your video's bit rate settings to reduce the video file size, or if the device demands it (e.g. the Apple iPhone has a 2.5 Mbps limit for video).

4. Audio format: Just as video has a bit rate, so does audio. But compared to video, audio bit rates are tiny. Good quality audio for a web video is 320 Kbps (around one-thousandth of the video bit rate). Nothing to worry about, in my opinion.

Common formats for compressed audio (it's usually compressed, unless you are playing a CD) are MP3 and AAC. Uncompressed audio formats like AIFF, WAV, and PCM may get you into trouble if you try to upload the video to the web or if you try to load the video onto a portable device.

5. Video formats: You can tell the current format of a video (any file really) by its suffix. ".mov" means it's a QuickTime file; ".MP4" means it's a, well, MPEG4 file; ".wav" means it's a Windows media file; and so on. What underlies each of these formats is a style of video compression (or "codec"). Common codecs are H264 (Apple preferred) and WMV9 (Windows preferred).

You should check your device to see what video file flavor it likes, but I haven't gone wrong so far with QuickTime H264.

Try to work from the original video timeline
By and large, you can switch from one video format to another and change any attributes you want - if and when needed.

But when changing any attribute of video, it is always best to make the change from the original editing timeline. Changing from one compressed format to another often involves some loss of quality and the creation of "artifacts" - small processing errors which tarnish the look of the video.

Not only but also...
Does this cover the basics?

There are a bunch of other settings to noodle over - like single-pass or multi-pass encoding; 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios; interlaced or progressive scanning; 44.1kHz or 48kHz audio sampling, compression key framing, and so on. But that's another Saturday and another blog.

Whew! Now, with that all over, next time we can look at some interesting places to showcase that family history video.

Jane Lehmann-Shafron is a video biographer who co-founded Your Story Here LLC Family History Video, a video production company that specializes in preserving family history. Based in Orange County CA, she was recently featured in national women's magazine "Woman's World" and her award-winning films have been featured in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted on 949-742-2755 or through her website.

Personal Documentary - And Immortality

2011-05-06T16:15:00.000-07:00

Because I could not stop for Death, / He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves / And immortality.
Emily Dickinson

Bee Gibbs died one week ago today surrounded by her family. "This is a good dress rehearsal," she told her kids gathered around her bed.

Bee was the "92 year old on Facebook" whose family asked me - earlier this year - to make a personal documentary about her life. And so I did. Our local newspaper wrote a story about Bee; and I hosted a screening of her personal documentary for a large group at her home on April 5. I wrote a Blog about Bee that I understand touched many people.

Bee's declining health did not stop her demonstrating on film her watercolor talents; and in her documentary she took us to her Facebook page and groaned, like we all do, with the endless chatter and interruptions that Facebook inevitably involves. Although at Bee's age, she was probably more impatient on that score than me.

And during the whole filming process, nothing could suppress Bee's joy and her obvious sense of humor. And her intelligence.

I sometimes dip into Emily Dickinson, the greatest poet on the subject of time and eternity, at moments of sadness and death.

Strange really - because her poems are mostly inexpressibly sad.

But something in that sadness is comforting. I suppose her poems help us see death as a Universal - something we all have in common.

Some, too fragile for winter winds,
The thoughtful grave encloses,—
Tenderly tucking them in from frost / Before their feet are cold.

These lines of Emily Dickinson could have been written about her own life. Like Bee, she was born in Massachusetts and loved literature. But doughty Bee went out into the world and made it to 92, while fragile Emily became reclusive and died at just 55. Both achieved a kind of immortality, both will be remembered.

I spoke to Bee's daughter when I got the sad tidings. I was filming on the east coast and heard the news late. She told me that all the family were happy about and grateful for the personal documentary, and "for making Bee feel like a star". She said that the project exceeded her expectations in every way. Truly, the pleasure was all mine.

Bee lived a full life and she left behind a record of her life's achievements and a record of her wit and her personality. Her family are to be congratulated for their initiative in commencing and then seeing her personal documentary through to completion. There are many distractions in our modern lives, and we don't always do the things that, in hindsight, only then seem so obvious. Not so for Bee's children. They preserved Bee's life in a way that will ensure she survives vividly in their memories and will be known to future generations.

Personal documentary - and immortality.

There are few comforts in death. But knowing that you have preserved the life with a personal documentary or a video biography is something, at least.

Ample make this bed. / Make this bed with awe;
In it wait till judgment break / Excellent and fair.

Be its mattress straight, / Be its pillow round;
Let no sunrise’ yellow noise / Interrupt this ground.

Rest peacefully Bee Gibbs.

Jane Lehmann-Shafron is a video biographer who co-founded Your Story Here LLC Personal Documentary, a video production company that specializes in preserving family history. Based in Orange County CA, she was recently featured in national women's magazine "Woman's World" and her award-winning films have been featured in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted on 949-742-2755 or through her website.

Restoring Historical Photographs

2011-04-08T14:06:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has done even the smallest amount of family history research has turned up old photos. Many times we look at them with a mixture of the pleasure of discovery, and dismay. The years (and the photo's owners) have not always been kind to those old images.
So here are some tips for restoring or repairing your old and historic photos.

Physical v. Digital Photo Repair
Thankfully, most of the old techniques for physical repair of photographs and negatives are dying out. For the amateur, physical repair often meant Scotch tape or correction fluid (see above). For the pro, it meant brushes and pigments, airbrushing, or chemical reprocessing (using bleach then B&W photo developer).

Trouble was, each of these techniques ran the risk of harming the original image. But now, with various photo editing programs, you can get a better result than ever before using digital tools.

If ever you have particularly grit-infested negatives or slides, you may be tempted to rewash them (they were washed in water originally). RESIST! Old film can become unstable and using water can lead to unpredictable and disastrous results.

Capture
So, for modern photo restoration, it's the digital way or the highway.

Now, to get the image into the computer so you can repair it, you are going to have to either scan it or photograph it with a digital camera. Both work well in my experience.

If your image is from a book, newspaper or a magazine, it was probably printed in "halftone" (tiny dots). In this case, best to scan, with the "descreening" button checked. And always scan at high resolutions.

When doing photo restoration, I scan most images at around 600 dpi and I scan small negatives and small images (e.g. passport photos) at 1200 or 2400 dpi.

Some quick fixes
Over here at Your Story Here we have been doing photo restoration for years. And we have learned a trick or two in that time. For instance, most photos can be restored using just 3 or 4 simple adjustments.

Straighten: Try to line up the image's horizon (or the ground) with the horizontal edges of the picture frame.

Crop: Take out any distracting detail, like irrelevant or cut-off people, or too much sky.

Contrast: Hit the auto contrast button and see what you think. (Most images look best if they have the whole tonal range - white through black. "Auto contrast" buttons force your darkest tone to black and your lightest to white.) If you're not happy, you may be able to adjust the mid-tones to get it right.

Color tone: Color can often be restored with a simple "auto color" adjustment - you can get especially good results with those faded, magenta-hued shots from the 1960s. Failing that, you will have to use the various "color balance" or "channel mixer" controls.

Dust and scratches
I never met an old photo that didn't have dust and scratches.

For this bit of photo restoration work, you are going to need Photoshop (if you don't have it, they often give away Photoshop "Elements" with a new printer - so check the disks that came with your last printer). The first step is to pull up the Filter > Noise > Dust and Scratches tool. This tool does an almost magical job of restoring a photo by eliminating tiny dust spots, but it does have the side effect of softening the whole image, so use it sparingly (try radius 1, threshold 4).

It's a good idea to use a layer mask to limit the impact of the "dust and scratches" filter to less important areas like clothes, the sky, background etc., leaving the face alone. (The "dust and scratches" filter often has the unintended consequence of taking the glint from people's eyes!)

If the job is too big for this fix, you are going to need the "cloning" tool or the "spot healing brush".

Some special photo repair problems
Silvering: You sometimes see deterioration of the silver halides in shadows and dark areas. These areas of efflorescence cause shiny spots that catch the light of the scanner - like you can see in this old death portrait.

The photo restoration trick here is to simply de-saturate the image, then recolor it on another layer with a (sepia) tone similar to the original and blend with the composite mode set to "color".

Torn photos and missing features: Photos with damage to parts such as eyes (see example above) need major surgery. Here you need to search for "spare parts". Damage to one side of a person can often be repaired by cutting, flipping and pasting a portion of the person's other side - this often works for eyes in particular. If that won't work, look for another photo of the person around the same age and use parts from that!

Know your limits
There are some intractable problems in photo restoration and photo repair. Poor focus at the time the photo was taken just cannot be fixed. Second, the imprint of heavily patterned paper is almost impossible to remove (although there are a few pro tricks that mitigate the effect); and chemical or food stains can be very time consuming.

But for the majority of run of the mill issues with restoring old photos, these can all be solved and the old folks who appear in them made to look almost young again!

Postscript: For the more adventurous, you may want to try out the free, open-source alternative to industry standard Photoshop: Photo Repair & Photo Restoration with GIMP

Jane Lehmann-Shafron is a video biographer who co-founded Your Story Here LLC Personal Documentary, a video production company that specializes in preserving family history. Based in Orange County CA, she was recently featured in national women's magazine "Woman's World" and her award-winning films have been featured in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted on 949-742-2755 or through her website.

Video Biography Genres

2011-03-20T10:48:00.000-07:00

No doubt about it - video biography is growing. As the technology gets cheaper and more accessible (case in point: have you noticed how many people now carry around those new "Flip" video cameras; soon to be replaced by cellphone video) and as our interest in genealogy rises (the birth of the genealogy TV show and the growth of Ancestry.com help attest to this) so too do the numbers of us who follow the urge to produce our own family history documentary.

What we choose to call what it is that we are doing is all over the map.

In "video biography", is the issue just nomenclature? Is it really case of one size (one name) fitting all with the basic approach always being the same? Or, does this exciting movement toward personal documentary offer us a cornucopia of distinct approaches? And it it does, what are those approaches?

Having been in the business of documenting personal and family histories for around 5 years now, I have formed the view that there are indeed a number of distinct genres for video biography. And I think the whole endeavor can be enriched by both professionals and subjects considering a clutch of exciting approaches.

In my list then, I have 10 video biography genres.

1. The Video Love Letter
You love someone so much - usually a spouse or partner - you want to tell them in a fresh, unique and public way.

Tom Patty is firmly in this category. He created a video love letter to his wife Susan. In it, we hear about Susan's life story so far (although she is still quite young) and we hear from all her friends, many of whom created mini-performances in her honor (a poem, a play...). The love letter incorporates clips of the couple's Tahitian wedding and it starts with an introductory flourish by Paul James "The Gardener Guy".

2. The Veterans Video
We owe so much to our soldiers: they have put themselves in positions of peril and risked their lives answering our country's highest and most difficult call. And in so doing they have often had such extraordinary experiences that for many years afterward they are barely able to tell about it.

What's defining for many of the "old soldiers" I have interviewed - including World War II veterans - is their modesty. And that holds true in the following example of a GI who served in Europe in 1944 and 1945.

3. The Personal History Video
If there is such a thing as the "vanilla" flavored video biography, then it must be the personal history video.

Here is told the subject's life story from soup to nuts using all the material to hand - including personal photographs, home movies, historical or archive images and footage, music, chapter breaks, captions, titles, credits and all the rest. In the personal history video, you shoot an interview on video and you try to capture the subject in an environment that's meaningful to them historically.

(The spotlight in the personal history video falls on one individual. The corresponding genre that covers the whole family is: 4. Family History Video: See for example "Pat and Ben's Family History Video Project".)

Sometimes you can get lucky, such was the case of 'Doc' Wylde who, in addition to being a successful, forceful and charismatic man, had rare Kodachrome home movie footage from a road trip he and some buddies took to Guaymas Mexico in the mid 50s.

5. The Ethical Will
This I have covered in a recent blog post on ethical wills on video. So, 'nuff said for now.

6. The Memory Loss Video
Memory loss video is a specialized case where the subject is losing their memory - usually due to Alzheimer's disease - and time is of the essence in preserving their remaining memories for the benefit of the surrounding family: Memory Loss Video

7. The Genealogy Video
Sometimes the subject has more than the average interest in, or more than the average amount of, genealogy and ancestry information.

The challenge becomes to incorporate documents and stories of distant ancestors into a genealogy video that is engaging and connected to modern people and modern times. One approach is to film the subject with props - for example, showing them doing ancestry research on their home computer. Another approach is to film them visiting graveyards where ancestors are buried.

Still another approach is to show traditions that have been passed down by the elders, such as recipes and cooking.

8. The Video Memorial
Sadly, sometimes we just don't make it in time to record a life story. Then we must deal with telling about the person through interviews with friends and family - and images, captions, quotations, music, home movies and so on.

When time is short - a memorial service is scheduled in mere days for example - then you may need to lean on photographs, words, and music alone.

9. The Business Biography
A subject's career often gets short shrift in family histories. For the children, a parent's devotion to business is often emotionally associated with a feeling of abandonment and even deprivation.

And yet for the working parent, their devotion is often the apotheosis of their love. It is only because of their deep, deep love and concern for their children that they can sacrifice what they most value - time with the child - to achieve material comfort and financial security for them.

And for some people in some careers, they overcome and achieve so much that their success becomes a beacon and a source of pride for generations to come. So it is right and proper that achievement and sacrifice is honored and recorded.

10. The Performance Video
For young lives particularly, the focus often falls on an activity or an achievement. A theater performance perhaps, or a sporting success.

The challenge for the video biographer here is to create a meaningful project that converts what is often mundane and repetitive footage into something extraordinary. In performance video, the star of the show (after the subject of course) becomes the video editor.

Musical performances work well for the "performance video" genre of video biography and - as for all performance video - the child involved can have fun sharing them around through YouTube or Facebook (being cautious with privacy issues of course).

Have we exhausted the video biography genres?

Jane Lehmann-Shafron is a video biographer who co-founded Your Story Here LLC Personal Documentary, a video production company that specializes in all genres of video biography. Based in Orange County CA, she was recently featured in national women's magazine "Woman's World" and her award-winning films have been featured in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted on 949-742-2755 or through her website.

At 92, Bee's on Facebook! Her personal documentary

2011-03-04T14:01:00.000-08:00

I got a call from Saratoga just before the holidays from Bee Gibbs' son Ben. The family, he said, were interested in a personal documentary of their mom Bee. Later, I spoke to daughter Paula in Brookline, Massachusetts, who told me, "I want my Mom to feel like a movie star!"

It was not long after, when I visited Bee at Heritage Pointe here in Orange County, that I first met this most remarkable woman.

From the information that son Ben had sent me, I already knew that Bee had been a Navy WAVE during the Second World War, and that during the war years she had traveled on her own across the country by rail to visit California. She also wanted to see the National Parks strung out along the way.
It was during that trip, that Bee first fell in love with California and especially California oranges. One of her most treasured photographs shows her posing among the orange groves in Anaheim (also holding a brace of avocados). But as I would later record in Bee's personal documentary, it would not be until some 60 years later that Bee would finally realize her dream of living here.

And that's something that I learned about Bee, that first morning in December 2010: age is no limit for Bee Gibbs.

Bee's college education was interrupted by the war and her marriage to Howard. Later, she resumed her studies and earned a bachelor's degree and then a master's degree. She used those qualifications to good effect. She became a teacher, then a librarian, and then she had her own television show where she was "The Book Lady".

Not bad for this first generation daughter of Russian immigrants.

So, having arrived in California with a lifetime of family, education, service and work behind her, Bee Gibbs might have been expected to take things a little easier. Play a little bingo maybe, soak up some sun.

Instead, Bee enrolled at Saddleback College and took more college courses - in art and computing. Bee Gibbs I discovered, is a life-long learner.

And she never forgot those California oranges that had so captivated her in 1945. In December 2010, as I worked on her personal documentary, Bee took me out to her balcony to see her very own orange tree - in a pot. And sure enough, there were her own oranges. (Although, I kind of got the feeling that they were more objects of admiration than future food!)

Happiness achieved? Nearly.

The only problem for Bee in her new digs now that she was finally here in her fabled southern California, was that her children were spread out across the nation; and two grandchildren live overseas and the other lives in Boston.

So Bee joined Facebook.

Facebook? But she's 92!

Well, as I found out making Bee's personal documentary, she has been a Facebook user for around 6 months and already has 28 friends, including all of her surviving children and some of her grandchildren.

On Facebook, Bee is subject to the same petty annoyances that bedevil us all, like invitations to be friends from people that, well, she really doesn't know all that well.

But all in all, Bee likes to spend time online. Because it keeps her connected to her family and because there are always new things to learn.

And as I conclude in Bee's personal documentary, Bee was born into one world and now lives in another. But at 92, she's still fully engaged and interested in this new one. She is still energized by all the creative possibilities it provides.

Bee Gibbs was a star before we met her. And she's still a star today.

And as well as being featured in her own personal documentary, Bee's story has made front page news here in Orange County. Is being the feature story in The Orange County Register too "old media" to impress our thoroughly modern Bee? Well, Bee has very wide tastes and is not above throwing a glance towards a broadsheet from time to time.

A remarkable woman indeed.

Jane Lehmann-Shafron is a video biographer who co-founded Your Story Here LLC Personal Documentary, a video production company that specializes in video biographies. Based in Orange County CA, her award-winning films have been featured in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted on 949-742-2755 or through her website.

Video Biographers 5 Quick Tips from Citizen Kane

2011-02-18T12:21:00.000-08:00

With the 83rd Annual Academy Awards coming up here in Southern California next week, the restless, roving cameras of Video Biography Central turn to the world of… Cinema!

It was exactly 60 years ago that the biography epic Citizen Kane was released and nominated for a whopping 9 Academy Awards. And strange to say, the film is a great primer for the would-be video biographer.

The film was immediately controversial - being a thinly disguised parody of reclusive media mogul William Randolph Hearst, and an object lesson about the emptiness of wealth. According to legend, it was the invisible hand of Hearst that put paid to Citizen Kane's Oscar ambitions - the film managed only one award: Best Screenplay. And it lost money.

Now considered by many to be the best film of all time, it was written, produced, and directed by - and it starred - 26 year old Orson Welles. (Twenty six years old!) He would never rise to these heights again, the curse of the artist who creates a work of genius at first try.

Even today, the movie plays surprisingly well at local art houses or on video. Styled as a kind of behind-the-scenes personal history documentary, its story structure is complex without being difficult to follow. It features a documentary-within-the-documentary and is propelled forward by the intrigue of unraveling the film's Big Mystery: What did the great Charles Foster Kane mean when he uttered his last words: "Rosebud" (whilst dropping a snow globe)?

For video biographers, personal documentary makers, and all of us interested in preserving personal and family history, Citizen Kane is still surprisingly rich in lessons and inspiration, and well worth the rental of the video DVD.

So, what are some of the lessons from Citizen Kane that we can apply to our work?

1. Timing is Everything, Chronology is not
Citizen Kane starts at the end of the subject's life. We are then treated to a "newsreel" focusing mostly on Kane's mid life business career, followed by a reading of his guardian's memoirs and then a jump back to his childhood (in snow - that's a clue by the way). Then we re-enter the present for an interview - then we jump back to the past, and that combination (interview then flashback) is repeated as we hear from key people in Kane's life: his news editor, his best friend, his second wife, and finally his butler.

The lesson here is that in telling the story of a life in a personal documentary, we need not be slaves to strict chronology. Audiences are a lot smarter than we sometimes give then credit for. You can start with ancestors and end with retirement (or death) - but the reverse order will also work. So will telling a parallel or part of the story, broken into bits and interspersed with the main timeline.

2. Let the Part Tell the Whole
Another lesson for the personal historian or video biographer comes with Citizen Kane's use of montages and specific incidents to compress information and help tell the story.

Montages are visual images cut into a sequence in close succession. As video biographers, we might use home movies (if we have them) or we might use personal images. For subjects who have been through a historic event - such as a war - a montage of archive images will work well.
And as personal historians and personal documentary makers, we know that we cannot include every detail. So keep an eye and ear out for a defining story or event. While it may only be one specific incident, it may speak volumes about the person as a whole.

3. Use Narration
Citizen Kane makes use of narration through the four interview subjects and through the narrator of the newsreel. They each tell of the Charles Foster Kane that they knew.

The benefit of third party narration in personal documentary - that is, narration beyond the interview subjects - is that it can cover large areas or long time periods very efficiently. Sometimes a video biography subject just takes too long to tell a great story. But use third party narration sparingly.

As a video biographer, I often use my own voice for narration. I have also imposed on friends and even used professionals from time to time.

4. Tell the Story in Pictures Whenever Possible
Like any major motion picture, Citizen Kane tells its story through words as well as visual images. And it has periods where there is no dialogue or narration - "thinking time" I like to call it. In the final scene, as Kane's "Xanadu" estate is being packed up and the "rubbish" burned, the whole mystery is revealed in silence as we see the flames consume the very thing at the heart of the story. The denouement is shown, not told.

In producing a personal documentary, remind yourself that film and video are fundamentally visual media. They are not radio. So make use of as many images and the most interesting footage you can get. Wherever possible, show don't tell. Try to let your audience draw their own conclusions. And make space for thinking time.

5. Focus on Formative Events
All of Charles Foster Kane's life was a search for love and validation, motivated by a harsh separation from his mother and his carefree boyhood. Indeed, it is a boyhood memory (snow) and a boyhood object (his sled, branded "Rosebud") that he has on his mind at the point of his death.

Hasn't it been said that it takes most of us the rest of our lives to make sense of our childhoods (an endeavor that we all have mixed success with)?

So, as personal historians and video biographers, focus especially on the early, formative events of your subject's life: poverty perhaps that leads to ambition and success; a bad father that contributes to making a man a paragon of the role; parents withholding love that make it difficult for a subject to now show affection; or a splendid, sunny childhood that helped make a subject optimistic and cheerful throughout their life.

Our job is not to make any such assertion or to draw any such conclusion. But our job is to tease out the early experiences of our subjects for what they may tell those who follow about the people they became.

Still Relevant
The influence of Citizen Kane and the power of human stories can be seen in the current crop of Oscar hopefuls - almost every film nominated for Best Picture is a biography picture in one guise or another.

One movie in particular - The Social Network - closely parallels the themes of Citizen Kane and gives us a modern echo of that striving, empty man at the center of a vast empire.

But my pick for this year's Best Picture? The King's Speech.

Picture credits: Wikipedia (public domain).

Jane Lehmann-Shafron is a video biographer who co-founded Your Story Here LLC Personal Documentary, a video production company that specializes in video biographies. Based in Orange County CA, her award-winning films have been featured in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted on 949-742-2755 or through her website.

Genealogy video: Kicking gravestones & seeing what comes out

2011-01-28T14:14:00.000-08:00

Boston's Bob Albee has been researching his ancestors for around 15 years. He has traced his family history from Africa - to Scandinavia - through William the Conqueror - to the New World - where the early Albees settled towns, battled Indians and fought in the Revolutionary War.

On-line and perambulatory research
Bob's genealogy research has been on-line as well as perambulatory. He has the good fortune to be living in New England within mere miles of towns founded by his ancestors. And he lives close to graveyards where the bones of those ancestors have lain in shady repose for hundreds of years.

There is nothing better Bob likes than "kicking the gravestones and seeing what comes out", he says. (I am pretty sure he means that figuratively!) And having acquired an enormous horde of genealogical material, Bob and his family decided to create a genealogy video.

The Albee line was an easy place to start. Following one common name certainly makes things easy - at least in the early going. (Although, as the wise old owls well know, and as Bob discovered, one family name is hardly ever spelled the same way all down the line.)

Showcasing genealogy
Genealogy video is an increasingly popular way to showcase ancestry and genealogy research. Making a documentary about what those researches have turned up is certainly a more engaging way to present family history - as Bob discovered when he premiered his genealogy video over the holidays late last year.

Bob's Albee ancestors moved to Maine in the third American generation. That farm was on Indian land. The Albees had had run-ins with Indians back in Mendon in Massachusetts. In Maine, there would be more Indian trouble – this time with the Abenaki Indians.

Bob grew up a long way from those early farms and those early threats. His manse was a 3 story apartment house on crowded Mansur Street, Jamaica Plains. His grandparents had the top floor, and Bob's family the middle. No Indians, but Bob grew up with a stronger sense of his family history than most, which may have contributed to his interest in genealogy and all those ancestors.

A distinguished career
Bob worked during his school years – selling newspapers, pulling sodas, and then selling suits in an up-market clothing store called Tweeds. His high school years were also the Cold War years for the nation and he remembers well the Cold War and the very real fear of nuclear attack.

He covers also covers those years, as well as his later career, in the genealogy video (Genealogy video is taking genealogy to a whole knew level).

Bob's career took him to City Hall where he became involved in public works. His interest in local history was stoked by those years working with the City and he became intimately acquainted with nearly every city block and every street. Bob became City Engineer in 1983 at the age of 39 – the second youngest in history.

His biggest challenge came with Boston's Central Artery Project in 1985 which would elevate his career to new heights of success - and scrutiny. The job was to bury Boston's elevated central artery. Built to much fanfare in the 1950s, it had become universally reviled.

For the next 14 years he immersed himself in all the intricacies of the central artery project and the building of the new airport tunnel. It was the biggest ever urban area engineering project ever in the nation's history.

One in a million
Bob Albee is one in a million in more sense than one. His career, including his service with the American Public Works Association, has been truly exceptional and marked him as one of the country's greatest public works engineers.

And his genealogy work means he is numbered among the many millions of fellow Americans who have used the modern tools, as well as old fashioned shoe leather, to find out about and honor their ancestors. How many Americans? It's an open question just how popular genealogy really is.

By creating a genealogy video, Bob has taken his place among the giants of his very illustrious family tree. Not only because of his contribution to the City of Boston, but by his honoring of those who have gone before and helping ensure that they stay alive in the hearts and minds of succeeding generations. A decoration on a family tree if ever there was one.

Thank you Bob.

Video Ethical Wills is the News

2011-01-07T11:51:00.000-08:00

"When my father died, it was like a whole library burned down." (Laurie Anderson - "World Without End")

I had the privilege to be interviewed about ethical wills on video for a recent newspaper story. And judging by the reaction and the calls I received after the article appeared, there is a lot of interest in so-called "legacy letters".

It's a very powerful idea: creating a film in which you get to talk to your descendants about the important things in life - from "beyond the grave".
The concept of an ethical will is not so much ego driven as arising from a desire to leave those who follow us with some thoughts, the recounting of experiences - even wisdom - that may help, comfort or even guide them in their own lives.

The difficult stuff
Even mistakes and difficult experiences have a place in an ethical will. Few of us have traveled through life without setbacks and without doing things which we immediately or later regretted. Children sometimes see only the successful side of us, little guessing about the times our achievements fell short of our aims; and mostly not knowing when we straight out did some really bone-headed things.

Why should we take the opportunity of an ethical will on video to come clean? The main reason for recounting the troubling aspects of our lives is to let our children know that set backs and mistakes are not fatal. Surviving is one of the most important lessons of life. Woody Allen supposedly said that 80% of success is just showing up. Well, I would say that 80% of life is just surviving! And how you survived and what you survived is always a story worth telling in a video ethical will.

Estate planning and ethical wills
In my travels, I have noticed that some in the legal and financial communities are slowly recognizing the importance of addressing the spiritual side of a life when making arrangements and estate planning. Some financial and estate planners are indeed encouraging their clients to record on paper or on video their spiritual legacy and I have spoken to a number of professionals who are making this an important value-add in their businesses.

It's true isn't it? We spend so much time worrying about our financial legacy, we don't always allocate enough time for our spiritual legacy or even our historical legacy. An ethical will is certainly a chance to put down in writing or on video what we care about most: Ethical Wills: The Missing Piece of Estate Planning.

Some clients of mine with substantial assets have chosen to pass on their material estates in trusts and bequests set up in deeds and testamentary wills worked out with their attorneys and estate planners - and they explain their hopes and intentions for the use of those assets in an ethical will on video.

Ethical wills versus video biographies
Is there any difference between an ethical will on video and a video biography?

In my book, an ethical will is a indispensable subset of the video biography or life story video. A video biography is documentary that aims to cover the entire life of the subject and which even delves back into the subject's ancestors. A good video biography will reserve a chapter or two in which the subject talks about life's lessons - a good life story video will always include an ethical will component.

Ethical wills are sometimes mixed up with medical or health care proxies. Medical and health care proxies are legal instruments appointing another person as agent to make decisions in the event of the incapacitation of the subject. They are quite distinct from ethical wills and not at all the same thing. What distinguishes an ethical will from medical proxies and even testamentary wills is that the former is not intended to be legally binding while the other two are.

Of course, in close families, your children and family will already know a good deal about your thoughts on Life's Big Subjects. But what of the rest of the family, what of the children of your children? There are always areas worth covering again: like reminding the family how much you love them and how proud of them you are. And an experienced video biographer will be able to guide the subject to cover areas that may be difficult for either the subject or the family to broach across the lunch table, such as: "Are you afraid of dying?"

How much for an ethical will on video?
I like to say that you can test the worth of the whole ethical-will-on-video idea by asking yourself this: What would you give to obtain a personal film of a departed parent, grandparent or even great-grandparent? Let's say that such a video existed, locked in storage, about to be destroyed - with only the payment of back storage fees for it to be released. Who would cavil at paying the fees?

There are experienced professionals who can assist with ethical wills on video. And, it is also an area where families can step in and do it for themselves: Five Steps to a Video Ethical Will.

We will be seeing more newspaper and magazine articles about ethical wills - on paper or on video. And as we enter another year, spend some time planning for a video biography or an ethical will for yourself or someone you care about. Because loss is just as Laurie Anderson sings:

"When my father died, we put him in the ground.
When my father died, it was like a whole library burned down.
World without end.
Remember me."
(From the song "World Without End" on her 1994 album "Bright Red".)

Take the time to save a book or two from the library of your loved one.

20 Of My Best Video Biography Quotations

2010-12-11T15:33:00.000-08:00

If the pen is mightier than the sword, then the aphorism is the ordnance of choice for the wordy warrior.

And in our soundbite world, the pithy statement is pretty much now king. Of course, there is nothing modern about the mighty maxim - it can be found scattered throughout the ancient as well as more recent literature.

In my travels, I keep an eye out for succinct sayings that help me describe or understand the process of analyzing and recording personal history. And this week, I am going to share some of them.

The first group of video biography related quotations apply to the question of why a person should bother recording a life story or creating a video biography in the first place:

The words a parent speaks to children in the privacy of the home are not overheard at the time, but, as in whispering galleries, they will be clearly heard at the end and by posterity. (Richter)

Life must be lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards. (Kierkegaard)

The words of the wise are as goads. (Ecclesiastes)

There is properly no history, only biography. (Emerson)

Silence is the virtue of fools. (Frances Bacon)

Read no history; nothing but biography, for that is life without theory. (Disraeli)

The good things which belong to prosperity are to be wished, but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired. (Seneca)

The only end of writing is to enable the readers to enjoy life or better to endure it. (Dr. Johnson)

My second group of life story quotations go to the sheer difficulty of the task of the personal historian and our impudence in even attempting the task: how do you squeeze a whole life into a relatively short work of biography?

It is a great fault, in descriptive poetry, to describe everything. (Pope)

Communication of all kinds is like painting - a compromise with impossibilities. (Samuel Butler)

One always has to spoil a picture a little bit, in order to finish it. (Delacroix)

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation. (Saki)

It requires an impartial person to make a good historian; but it is the partial and one-sided who hunt out the materials. (Acton)

This third group of quotations inspires me to create something unique and even fun in my personal history and video biographies:

If you can speak what you never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done a rare thing. (Thoreau)

The art of Biography
Is different to Geography.
Geography is about maps,
But biography is about chaps. (Bentley)

Unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs...it was Plato, in his solemn old age, who said it. (Santayana)

The fourth group of quotations help inspire my video biography work and relate to the (very rare) difficult client or the (ditto) difficult subject:

Offensive objects, at a proper distance, acquire even a degree of beauty. (Shenstone)

One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person one knows. (Goethe)

It would be a good thing if man concerned himself more with the history of his nature than with the history of his deeds. (Hebbel)

Happy the people whose annals are boring to read. (Montesquieu)

Her funeral sermon (which was long
And followed by a sacred song)
Mentioned her virtues, it is true,
But dwelt upon her vices too. (Belloc)

Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them. (Wilde)

Fifth, there are the clever personal history quotations that are just too true to go without:

The whole scheme of things is turned wrong end to. Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages. (Twain)

The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife. (Connolly)

What is it about the bon mot and biography? Why is it that generations of writers and polymaths keep returning to the subject of biography and why is it that their output engenders such an interest in us?

Jane Lehmann-Shafron co-founded Your Story Here Video Biography, a documentary production company that specializes in video biographies. Based in Orange County CA, her award-winning films have been featured in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted on 949-742-2755 or through her website.

Life Story Video: Best Time of the Year

2010-11-20T15:42:00.000-08:00

November really is the best time of the year. Most of the work has been done and the holidays are upon us. I still have a few major family video memory projects to finish up, but I am now getting into that "end of year" zone.

The weekend before Thanksgiving is always my weekend for getting my holiday cards in shape for all my life story video clients, their families, my business partners and all the other good people who are all part of Your Story Here's extended family. It's always a challenge to come up with something fresh and original - yet something that reflects the historical and nostalgic nature of much of the work we do.

Our family video DVDs are always a blend of personal stories, personal photographs, home movies, archive films, historical images, voice-over, as well as text and music. In production, I ask questions about events in the person's life and in their family's life. I also ask questions to connect the person to the historical times they lived through.

In addition, I like to capture occupational footage of the life story video subject. I film them going about some favorite hobby or pass-time - or just pursuing a routine activity. For folks still working, I may video them at work. For others, it may be at karaoke or visiting some favorite childhood location. Getting the camera outside helps the life story video "breathe".

I also use this time of year to get my birthday cards ready for next year. I have the privilege of working almost daily with archive and historical photographs that I use in my biography videos and nothing is more fun than pulling out some favorite images and dreaming up kooky captions. Not always easy, mind you. (And, looking at some of the samples on this page, you may have a more apposite epithet for my feeble efforts!)

The Library of Congress, I've learned, has endless files of historical images that can be used in biography projects - from the Civil War and earlier right through the Civil Rights period. In many cases the images are either so old, or were created by a federal government agency, that there are no copyright restrictions on using them in family video memories. So I do.

Also around this time of year I reflect that helping preserve family memories on video is an intensely personal business. The relationship with the subject only really works when a bond of trust is formed. I often counsel people thinking of starting in this business: You hold a very precious thing in your hands when you come to preserve a life story on video. It is a deep privilege to be let into the special circle of confidence that is created around a life story biography project. "Feel the weight of that responsibility." I tell them. "It is not to be taken lightly."

The relationship with the biography client often grows over time - even after the project is finished. Except for a spouse, the life story biographer may come to know the person and their story better than almost anyone else. So I can't help but keep in touch, even long after the project is finished. And my little cards, and my November routine, are all part of that.

I keep in touch with clients and my "extended family" in other ways besides my holiday and birthday cards. I send out a bi-monthly newsletter and I sometimes send links to articles that I have written that I think could be of interest, like Digitizing Family History. When you have seen and felt the tragic consequences of not preserving a person's history, you become a bit of a zealot. My mission is to save lives, one video at a time!

Not everyone I meet who has the interest also has the energy - or the present impetus - to create a life story video. But what if you don't? It was just this quandary that got me thinking and then got me scribbling: Life Story Video: Never Take No For an Answer.

The afternoon here is wearing out, the end of the year approaches, and time is not slowing down. I still have a lot of work to do on my cards. So many zany captions and so little time!

Jokes aside, this is a family time of year. Most of us will be reuniting with at least some of our families. This time together will be a chance to gather some more of the old stories, even some of the new stories. It will be a chance to understand each other just a little better, and where we came from, and where home really is. And if you need help with coming up with some questions to get things rolling, or if you need help putting a family video memory project together, please get in touch with me.

Happy holidays!

Postscript:
Some people were asking me about the fonts I used in these cards and in my video work and I promised to write something about that. For those who are interested, here something I wrote called "Writers: The Only 9 Fonts You'll Ever Need".

Jane Lehmann-Shafron co-founded Your Story Here Video Biography, a documentary production company that specializes in family video memories, video biography, and life story videos. Based in Orange County CA, her award-winning films have been featured in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted on 949-742-2755 or through her website.

A Veteran's Video: The Forgotten War

2010-10-30T11:31:00.000-07:00

The Korean War is often called the "forgotten war" - sandwiched as it is between the somehow more memorable WWII and the Vietnam War. And yet, it was the first "hot" battle of the Cold War and more than a million Americans served and more than 30,000 died between 1950 and 1953. And for my client Tom B who fought there, the memories are as fresh as ever.

The Korean War was kind of a consolation prize for some Americans too young to serve in World War II. In many families, it was the younger brother who had enviously watched an older sibling serve in Europe or the Pacific. They eventually got their own war - but it wasn't quite the same.

A worthy war
The Korean War was a fight just as worthy as the Second World War - the objective was to repulse an unwelcome Soviet sponsored invasion of the South, after all. But it was a war that ended in a kind of whimpered draw. And, the MASH movie and TV show aside, it is a war that has little hold on our collective consciousness.

I was reminded of all this last week shooting a veterans video of Tom B who was sent to South Korea in 1952 (these are his photos).

He was only 'sort of' that younger brother (his brother John was indeed a WWII veteran). Sure, Tom fully supported the goals of the Korean conflict - but his draft into the infantry was decidedly unwelcome. The post-war economy was starting to boom and Tom was just getting started on what would end up (after the interruption) as a very successful business career. The Korean War didn't need to come to Tom's rescue - as WWII did for so many others in 1941 after the endless Depression.

Monotonous misery
Tom was lucky in that he entered the Korean War in its stalemate period - after MacArthur's push up to the very border of China and the inevitable Chinese counter-offensive. Most of the war's casualties occurred in those fateful, bloodthirsty battles. After that, the war settled into a kind of monotonous misery around the Chorwon Valley and the 38th Parallel.

Tom made it back in tact, although it would be wrong to say he was unaffected. He had served at the front-line and endured constant fear, deprivation and trauma. Men died either side of him. He suffered with the freezing cold, and was appalled by deaths caused by the enemy as well as by deaths caused by friendly fire. He sympathizes now with the suffering of the North and to this day is mournful of the enormous loss of civilian life.

Best try to forget about it, was Tom's attitude.

Living in holes
Some things couldn't be forgotten though. Like living in holes in the hills. And Tom can't ever forget his first night patrol, leading a platoon on a routine scouting mission. Some genius officer, safe back in camp, thought it would be a good idea to light up the fields by beaming lights up to the clouds. The reflected light was supposed to reveal any hidden North Korean or Chinese soldiers. But it also illuminated Tom and his men, making them prime targets! Years later, he remembered watching a very similar scene in Apocalypse Now and felt a wave of scary déjà vu.

Tom never made a lot of his war experiences. Most men don't. It's always a difficult discussion with those who weren't there. But Tom had passed his 80th birthday and his family thought it was time he told the story of those years - the story of this veteran on video.

Letters home
Tom did write letters home at the time. But his letters were anguishing. His brother warned him against being too specific because he thought it was too upsetting for their mother. Tom, who is as penetrating, direct and honest now as he was then, was nonplussed. This was what was happening to him, and he can't write about it?

He remembers his feeling on returning to the US. The best part, he says, was that no one was trying to kill him. He remembers handing in his rifle; it was like having a hand cut off - it had been his companion for so long.

Later, after the interview, Tom was looking at some of his military paraphernalia - buttons, rifle badges, his corporal chevrons, medals. He kind of shrugged. The Korean War - it's a chapter. It was time to talk about it. It was a formative experience no question. But it doesn't define him.

Veterans video
A veterans video allows former soldiers' war stories to be told and their experiences preserved for their children and grandchildren. Mostly, the veteran concerned, like Tom, has moved on and will not be a driving force in a veterans video project. But the stories of our old soldiers must be preserved. We owe them that honor and we have that duty to our succeeding generations.

The Korean War will most likely forever remain the forgotten war. But the story of its veterans' struggles must never be forgotten. Preserve the story of a soldier you know with a veterans video.

Our Last Goodbye: Video Memorials & Funeral Slideshows

2010-10-08T12:25:00.000-07:00

Death is not new. And the way we celebrate the life just passed has its roots in ancient times. But the tools now available allow us to make our last goodbye memorable and meaningful in whole new dimensions with video memorials and modern funeral slideshows.

Rage, death and a woman's grief
It's true. We probably can thank the ancient Greeks for our modern approach to funerals. It was the Greeks after all who honed the funeral oration to a thing of beauty and high art; who made words uttered at the graveside a staple of every passing.

Some of the earliest instances of "eulogy" (a Greek word right there) appear in Homer's Iliad where the death of Patroclus all but drives Achilles, his friend, mad. His rage results in the death of Trojan hero Hector, whom Homer has lamented, fittingly, by his wife:

Husband, you were too young to die and leave me widowed in my home... You, Troy's guardian, have perished, you that watched over her and kept her loyal wives and babies safe.

Andromache's thoughts turn from Troy to her own special grief:

Mine is the bitterest regret of all because you did not die in bed and stretching out your arms to me give me some tender word that I might have treasured in my tears by night and day.

Perhaps the most famous funeral oration in the ancient literature is Thucydides' report of Pericles' speech for the first dead in the Peloponnesian War. Pericles pauses at the inadequacy of words:

These men have showed themselves valiant in action and it would be enough I think for their glories to be proclaimed in action... Our belief in the courage and manliness of so many should not be hazarded on the goodness or badness of one man's speech.

Lincoln knew his Greek
Doubtless, President Lincoln read this classic passage before penning his brief but sublime Gettysburg address:

...we can not dedicate - we can not consecrate - we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here...

Lincoln, at the time, thought his own words weak - and believed they went largely unheard. But History, which leans more on the artifacts left behind and their current impact, judges otherwise. Certainly, the humility and pain of the President, and the sacrifice and hope of the dead, is right there in the address.

What is good and worthy
Words composed for and spoken at a funeral do have a special resonance. In them, we try to sum up the life and show its meaning for us. We attempt, through the service, to show that the deceased mattered.

We also try to use the opportunity of the funeral to teach our children about the life, and what was good and worthy about it. We try to honor family, society and religious traditions. It's a lot to ask - especially at a time when we are often weakened by grief. But the occasion demands it.

So we recognize the importance of the funeral ceremony, which has changed from ancient times and which for many folks has incorporated many of the wonderful opportunities now available for celebrating a life. Such as video technology.

Nothing else comes as close to bottling reality as the moving image. Maybe that's because a film unspools in a continuous progression - just as life does. And video has sound as well as images - putting it ahead of photographs, bare sound recordings and even biographical writing in terms of capturing personality. So when it comes to keeping our loved ones alive - even cheating death in a way - the best option is often a memorial video: Memorial Videos: Surviving Death Has Never Been Easier.

Youth, splendor, age and wisdom
A memorial video can present a life with an accuracy, an immediacy and an emotional impact never dreamed of by the Greeks. It gives us an opportunity to reflect on the life and recall the days of youth and splendor and as well as the years of age and wisdom. If we are lucky, there will be words of the deceased left behind on old tapes or letters that can be incorporated, along with images and music.

The challenge is to rise to this important occasion - to use the energy and impetus unleashed by the death to create a fitting tribute. The work can be done by the family - and there are resources available to help with that task: Funeral Slideshows and Memorial Videos: 5 DIY Options.

Things to include in memorial video and funeral slideshows
Funeral slideshows are now well accepted. But they can be so much more than a hum-drum cycle through the old family album. The freedom and options we now have can give the deceased a kind of immortality that was undreamed of even 10 years ago. You may even have the skill and patience to create a truly epic tribute to the life now passed. If you don't, there are professionals to help who have made funeral slideshows a specialty.

For example, why not consider adding voice over to the slideshow? Lots of video editing programs will allow you to narrate some brief comments - or perhaps narrate the entire arc of the life - with a simple tech store mic. Family members may prefer to record their thoughts and memories and have them played - rather than have to confront an audience for their eulogy at the funeral.

Maybe there is old home movie footage. My experience is that where there is film of the deceased, there is never enough. It is usually fleeting, or the bit in focus is oh so brief. So you may want to slow it down.

Don't forget to find out about poems and sayings for the memorial video or funeral slideshow. Consider letters and handwriting. Consider a web posting. Consider all the artifacts of the life now passed: Funeral Slideshows: 10 Unusual Things to Include.

Death is not new, but the pain it causes to those remaining is evergreen. We should take our lead from the ancients and properly honor those who have passed on. And we should take full advantage of our creative potential to make the celebration of the life worthy of our loved one and those of us they have left behind.

Jane Lehmann-Shafron co-founded Your Story Here Video Biography, a documentary production company that specializes in video biography, family history documentary as well as video memorials and funeral slideshows. Based in Orange County CA, her award-winning films have been featured in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted on 949 742-2755 or through her website.

A novel choice for personal historians & family history buffs

2010-09-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

The new best selling novel by Jonathan Franzen spotlights the inner workings of a modern American family making its way through the perils and pressures of contemporary society. Its focus on families, and more particularly parenting, makes it an ideal reading choice for personal historians, personal history buffs and those seeking to understand and explain family dynamics.

Much like his first novel, "The Corrections", and much like the early novels of the recently passed John Updike, Franzen's "Freedom" holds a mirror to modern culture by peering through the magnifying glass at what - from the outside anyway - should pass for a typical nuclear family. What we find, of course, is that the family is riven by regret, conflict and jealousy which, though universal, results in behaviors that are peculiar and attach very much to their own time.

Like Tolstoy
It is, perhaps, as Tolstoy wrote: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" - the famous opening line from "Anna Karenina". Franzen shows his own knowledge of the Russian greats when one of his own tortured characters finds parallels to her own life in "War and Peace" - and emulates the doubtful choices of one of that novel's characters (I say no more to avoid spoiling the plot!).

The novel is being hailed as a modern masterpiece, although some critics wonder why a male writer is receiving so much acclaim in making the family the centerpiece of a great story when more than one female writer has done the same to much more muted reviews. This criticism gains some force from the fact that a fair chunk of "Freedom" is written from the point of view (and in the voice of) a female character: Feminist 'Franzenfreude' Over Raves For 'Freedom'.

For us personal historians and family history buffs, Franzen may seem an odd choice to be the voice of the embattled modern family. Childless himself, and with his own marriage at the wrecking yard, he says his parents taught him all he needed to know:

"My parents were in their own way so unsatisfied, so angry about so many things, that it was impossible for a sensitive kid not to internalize their view of the world," he says. "It resulted in my being this strangely middle-aged 14- and 15-year-old."

The Oprah Incident
Of course, Jonathan Franzen became really famous (he was already known as a great writer) ten years ago when he expressed reservations about his best-selling novel "The Corrections" being featured (and recommended) by Oprah Winfrey. He was troubled by the "schmaltzy" company that the novel would keep on that particular book club shelf.

Oprah promptly canceled her TV interview with Franzen and Franzen was forever branded a literary snob. (That controversy didn't seem to do either of them any harm - possibly in the way that all modern scandals seem to prove the truth of the old Nietzschean aphorism: "What does not kill me makes me stronger".)

"Freedom" is set in the post 9/11 years under President Bush. The book is not overtly political, although the events of the following decade do feature and politics is a source of discussion by the characters and sometimes their plot motivations. Franzen says of one of the main characters, Walter, the book's moral center perhaps:

"Walter is a portrait in the displacement of unspeakable rage about what's going on in his family through speakable rage about what's going on in his country," Franzen says, in a recent interview at NPR.

When Families Fall Apart
For me, the main subject of the book - if it has a main subject - might be family relationships and parenting and what it looks like when, at least for a time, it all falls apart. Long suppressed desires and impulses and unresolved character issues can fester then bubble to the surface in bitter pustules that poison ordinary relations.

And "Freedom" is just like life. It's long. It's messy. It's complicated. There's so much regret mixed in with the stuff to be proud of. And I won't spoil the ending by giving away how (if at all) things resolve themselves. That would be beside the point.

Because as personal historians and family history buffs, "Freedom" tells us that life is a process, not an outcome. That decisions within families are motivated by multiple causes, not all of them laudatory. That good people can do bad things and that no one thing a person does in life can truly define that life.

And although "Freedom" is darker than many of us would like to imagine our own lives and the lives being lived over our side fences, it tells the truth of our collective, human clumsiness. But at the end of the day, pustules notwithstanding, we are all we have.

Jane Lehmann-Shafron co-founded Your Story Here Family History Video, a documentary production company that specializes in video biography and family history documentary. Based in Orange County CA, her award-winning films have been featured in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted on 949 742-2755 or through her website.

Family history embedded in toys

2010-09-05T11:14:00.000-07:00

We all have "accidental" family history albums. Family history which is not carefully pasted in a book - but which has become embedded in experiences and things that come up on us by accident. Like old toys maybe.

The flood in my kitchen that I mentioned a few weeks back prompted me to do a spot of spring cleaning. So I put aside family history for a morning and got to work. You know how that goes. You get started and then it's hard to stop - not because it's so much fun - but because there is no clear stopping point! Every cupboard that you clean stands as a reproach to the dusty, cluttered other ones that you haven't touched. Even in other rooms.

So I eventually got to the kids' closets and surveyed all the dear, dear detritus of their childhood. Boy, that's an emotional tsunami - each shelf an accident family history album; each cupboard a library. Soft toys, bouncy balls, plastic binoculars, Lego sets (times 20), Halloween costumes, traveling chess sets, Star Wars Monopoly and on and on it goes.

I picked up the teddy bear that one of my boys couldn't sleep without - for five years at least. It went everywhere with us. One tragic day we left it in another city. The feelings of loss and despair that we all felt when we realized it had not made the trip back hit us like a punch in the gut (well, the boy and his parents felt the hit - his brothers didn't appear too troubled). Happily, a kind person mailed him back to us. But those three days waiting for the bear to return were the longest three days in my sons' short life to that point.

So the bear stays in the picture. Too much family history wrapped up in his po-face.

Then there are those painted wooden boats that my husband brought back from a business trip when the kids were still very young (and he was much younger himself!). What a terrible present they were! Too delicate to be taken out on rainy days to float in the rivers along the curb, they stayed on a shelf in the boys' bedroom for years gathering dust. But year after year whenever I was in their room I noticed them - looking bright and cheerful, and completely ignored by their owners. Oddly, those boats evoke my small-child days in a way few other things do.

So the boats aren't going anywhere either.

And what about the Christening blanket that my mother-in-law knitted and that I used with all my children. I couldn't even guess at the names of the intricate stitches she used to get the gorgeous pattern that it has. (Before she died she also knitted endless woolen sweaters that, now living in California, we wear once or twice a year if we are lucky - or "unlucky" perhaps). Just holding it up in my hands brings back family history memories of her sitting in her chair, knitting needles clicking away connecting her ever growing garment with the ball of colored wool hidden in the knitting bag by her chair.

I am not giving away the Christening blanket. (Well, not until I hand it over to a future daughter-in-law who I can rely on to value it like I do.)

Oh look! The possum and platypus glove puppets!! We used to laugh and laugh inventing voices and games for them. And what about the (fake) skunk skin hat? The fossil collection? Thomas the Tank Engine? The home-made swords and shields? The boxing gloves? The skateboards? Buzz and Woody (from the first movie)? They must be a collector's item, almost (except that Woody's string was long ago scissored off).

Nope, they can't go either. Each of those items is steeped in family history.

And then I notice a whole new category of childhood artifact: The school project. There could hardly be family history wrapped up in a school project, surely.

Hmmm. In our house "school project" means two Christopher Columbus's ships - made from cardboard, copious amounts of felt pen, and close to 50 hours of combined child and parent toil, sweat and tears . It means ancient Greek helmets made from papier-mâché slathered over balloons and decorated with brown enamels. It means book reports on famous people whose covers had to reflect an aspect of the life (Genghis Khan's shield, Teddy Roosevelt's bear, Captain Cook's map of the Pacific).

Each school project was an epic creation that transfixed the house and monopolized our attention for weeks. You can't give that kind of stuff away. And I am sure not ready to throw it all away.

Don't even get me started on their artwork. Or the book of cartoons they drew one summer when they were 7 or so then got my husband to create dozens of photocopies at the office so they could sell them to their friends. Or the signs they made for lemonade stands. Or the journals I occasionally made them write when we traveled (what a struggle that was - the boys' enthusiasm for the task reflected in their spelling barely a single word properly).

What about the books we read together? Each cover (well, many of them anyway) brings back another page in our accidental family history album.

My husband has no such separation issues. He has the pleasure of accidental family history every time he goes in the garage. Because he still has the kids' fishing rods and their baseball gloves and the basketballs and the footballs all sitting in the ball box where they have always lived - and probably always will.

It occurs to me that one solution might be to digitize this family history. Take photos of every item and place them into a real family history album. It may not be as good as smelling that old bear, and feeling the soft texture of his fur, but it would be better than an empty cupboard and a challenged memory.

What do other people do with all this family history embedded in toys? Keep them forever?

That's what I plan to do. I'm keeping these toys forever. For me - not the kids. Cleaning season is over.

Jane Lehmann-Shafron co-founded Your Story Here Video Biography, a documentary production company that specializes in video biography and family history documentary. Based in Orange County CA, her award-winning films have been featured in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted on 949 742-2755 or through her website.

Video Biography: Incorporating Images

2010-08-21T13:12:00.000-07:00

A slight change of pace this week as I answer the DIY question: What are the best ways of incorporating photographs into a video biography or a family history video?

The choices for using images in a video memoir can be broken down into "in camera" incorporation and incorporation during the editing process.

If you are just getting started in video editing, then you may prefer to incorporate during filming ("in camera"). Otherwise you can wait till you edit. And for the advanced biographer, you can do both.

In camera incorporation

Incorporating old photographs or documents using your video camera is the simplest way of capturing and displaying images that are associated with your subject. If you don't plan to edit the video tape at all (or if you don't know how to) then you can just roll right through the interview with you or the subject showing the images at the appropriate time.

Now, there are a number of ways of including images in your video biography as you go along. Here are some ideas.

Have the subject hold them up: You film the subject talking and at the appropriate time you hand them an image and they hold it in front of their chest or just to the side and they talk about it. When they are finished they hand it back. In my experience, it works best for the interviewer to feed the photographs to the subject.

You can rely on the subject to choose photos as they go, but you are likely to get a lot of sorting and shuffling on film that you will have to edit out later. If you do want to leave the choice to the subject, try filming your subject across a table and have the images laid out in front of them in small batches.

Film the subject turning the pages of the album: Sometimes the photos are not loose but are in an album. Shooting the subject over their shoulder as they look at the album can be a good look and makes a nice variation from the straight interview set up.

Filming the subject turning the pages of a book works especially well if you have an old period album or if there are handwritten descriptions. Take care with albums which have the plastic protection - reflections can destroy the shot.

Shoot the images on a computer screen: These days, more and more people are posting their images to a blog, Flickr, Ancestry.com or some other image hosting site. If that's the case, then you should be able to film the images directly off the computer monitor. You can even have your subject scrolling through the images, or you may even choose to set up the computer monitor in the background with an appropriately chosen image.

A word of warning though: If your video camera frame rate and your computer monitor frame/refresh rate are out of kilter then you may get ruinous flicker or black bars on your video picture.

It works best if your camera is set at 30 frames per second (which in North America it should be) and the frame rate or the refresh rate is some multiple of that - say 60 fps or 60 or 90 Hz. Best advice is to experiment shooting the screen and play with the computer monitor refresh or frame rate settings only if you have to.

Film a picture in close up: Most people have heard of the "Ken Burns Effect" on a picture. It's where you get up really close on an image and move across its inner most details giving the viewer the feeling of actually being in the picture. (Ken Burns used this technique to sublime effect in his documentary on the Civil War.)

You can get this effect while editing - but Ken Burns got it with his camera. And you can too. Just make sure you have enough light, avoid light reflections, set your camera on a tripod, zoom in and pan gently across.

Image incorporation during editing

This can be more involved than incorporating images in the camera, but you are likely to get a higher quality result. You will not have any camera shake for one thing; for another you can take the opportunity to retouch or restore the images; and finally, you can get in really close to reveal details that may have been hidden for decades.

First you need to scan your images in. You need to take care to use the proper scanner settings: Scanning photos? Use these scanner settings.

Next, take the time to explore your options to restore the images to their former glory: Professional retouching & restoration of digital photographs.

Then, with the image safely digitized, you can import it into your editing project and splice it into the interview material. If you are planning to use the "Ken Burns Effect" make sure that you move from the less important detail of the picture and land on its most significant part. And don't forget to include captions on the image.

Green screen: A hybrid method for incorporating images into your video biography is to film your subject against an evenly lit, plain colored backdrop (green is best, since that color does not appear in human skin). Then, during editing, you create a mask covering the (green) background and replace it with a digitized image. (It's a technique often used in news programs.) In a video memoir, the effect can be stunning, if somewhat unnatural.

How long should you leave an image on screen? That will depend on a number of factors such as how long the final video biography will be, how interesting the images is, what condition the image is in (less time if it is damaged or out of focus), how large and detailed it is, and how many other images you have to include. You may display it for as little as 6 seconds or you may leave a good image on for up to 30 seconds.

Now, if you have read this far and you would like to see a combination of these methods used in the one family history video, here is the opening sequence to a video memoir which I made earlier this year called "Living in History":

And if you need professional help with your video biography - by all means give me a call!

Personal History as Art

2010-08-08T14:22:00.000-07:00

I have been on vacation the last few weeks, which means that I have not been video-biography blogging. But here I am back.

The bad news is that I came back to a water leak in the kitchen that ruined my entire downstairs floor. I am walking around on cruddy concrete for the next month or so while it all dries out. The good news is that I got to visit a few art galleries while I was gone. And one series of portraits - by an Australian photographer called Ruth Maddison - reminded me of why I love family history video.

The portraits I am talking about are cheerful images of ordinary women (taken beside their front fences by the looks of them) accompanied by short biographical sketches written (I think) in their own hand. The pictures are disarming in their directness and their unashamed display of domesticity. One woman holds a sponge cake and another holds a flower, still wearing her apron.

The first thought I had was what were these grandma pictures even doing in this fancy-schmancy art gallery? Isn't this a palace of "high art"?

(Well, I suppose if you look carefully, you can see that the images have been worked on a bit - the artist used oil paint and there is a kind of Kodachrome look to them recalling, perhaps, the 1950s and 1960s when the subjects were in their prime.)

But as I gazed up at them, thoughts of "fit" fled as I experienced the same frisson I get whenever I am privileged to enter into the special secret which is another person's life. And the excitement was all the greater for the warmth, honesty and lack of artifice that informs the images and accompanies the self-descriptions. Grace Buckley (above), 69, says:

I love housework. I washed two walls last Thursday 'cos I didn't know what to do...

I would've liked five children but we didn't have any.

Molly O'Sullivan (right), 82, tells us that before the Depression:

... I worked in a millinery. In 1932 I went to work at ICI. They made explosives.

From hats and dresses to dynamite. Little facts make up all of our lives just as much as the big ones. Like the grains in a gelatin silver photographic print, the facts of our life are all tiny dots that together constitute our story. And like the photographer, we can select and arrange the grains of our life in whatever narrative we think best defines us and what we have done. So all of personal history is a kind of art.

Another part of the intrigue of Ruth Maddison's portraits is what she and the subjects choose not to reveal. "Negative space" - the area in which there is no color or text - defines good design. It is also a good place to focus in biography. And looking at the portraits, I found myself wondering about the things not mentioned - the people not mentioned. The pictures are from a series called "After Work" which she completed in 1990 and they are part of the collection at the National Gallery of Victoria.

We may not be artists in the strict sense but we are all photographers and we can all play our part as personal historians. The simplicity of these beautiful and powerful images reminds us that everyone of us can help tell the most important stories that we have. The stories of our lives. Family history video.

It's great to be back.

A Bridge to Father

2010-06-20T11:21:00.000-07:00

Fathers are a lot easier to ignore than mothers. Mothers are in our lives and in our faces from the get-go.

They say women do two-thirds of the world's work, and a lot of that is in the home doing more than our fair share of the parenting. Dads often spend more time out of the house - for obvious reasons - and do a lot of their parenting by proxy. When they are around, they can be out of sync with the family's rhythms, and explode at the wrong things or fail to respond to the right things.
And fathers are not always the best communicators. As one father said to me: "I spend the whole day at work listening and talking to people. My head gets filled up with it all. When I get home I just need... quiet." Dream on.

So fathers are a lot easier to take for granted. But most of us, sooner or later, come to appreciate our fathers and rebuild bridges that may have long been damaged or even destroyed. Sometimes a new level of understanding with our fathers can emerge in odd or difficult circumstances.

Writer Philip Roth has mined his upbringing in Newark, New Jersey - and his own family - for inspiration for his novels for decades. But possibly his greatest work is a non-fiction book - Patrimony - he wrote about his father, then eighty six years old. It's a funny, harrowing account of his Dad's last days - and the reversal of roles that sometimes occurs.

Never one to shy away from the bizarre or the lurid, Roth describes - over an agonizing 6 pages - the experience of cleaning up his own father after a messy fecal accident. It's an event he manages to describe with some tenderness, and concludes: "(T)his, too, was right and as it should be."

Roth then recalls another time, some 7 years earlier, after his mother had just passed away and he was staying over with his Dad:

"We took turns in the bathroom and then, in our pajamas, we lay down side by side in the bed where he had slept with my mother two nights before, the only bed in the apartment. After turning off the light, I reached and took his hand and held it as you would the hand of a child who is frightened of the dark."

Another artist, this time the photographer Phillip Toledano, has been chronicling the last years of his dad in pictures; images that his father (with a little more parental candor than one might invite) calls "terrible". The pictures have been assembled into a new book called "Days With My Father".

Like more than one child, it took the death of Toledano's mother to make his father's mortality real:

“Over the past few years, both my parents died, my aunt died, my uncle—everyone croaked simultaneously, like an asteroid hit the Toledano section of the continent. One of the things I realized after the Toledano mass extinction is that all of the clichés are true, which is really annoying. When they say that your parents might be gone tomorrow, the people you love might be gone in a second, so the time you have with them is really important — it’s all true.”

(Read more at the New Yorker: Off the Shelf: Days With My Father.)

Life comes at us so fast and our fathers - our parents - are always just... there. Until they are not anymore. There is an unspeakable sadness in having sent little tributes to our parents over the years: a newspaper cutting maybe, a report of a promotion, a photo of the new baby, our child's graduation portrait - only to have to collect them back again when they are no longer there. After they pass, who do you send that kind of stuff too? Who really cares, like a parent?

Fathers' Day is a cliché, and it may only have been invented as a kind of equal time commemoration to match the more established Mothers' Day, but it marks one of the most important relationships we will ever have. And as we ourselves age, that bond with our fathers becomes an ever more fragile, ever more valuable, relationship.

Some people - like Philip Roth - have honored the connection with their father in writing; some, like Phillip Toledano, in photographs. Others still, choose to honor their fathers (and their mothers) by helping them with their own memoirs - like a video biography.

We all have a bridge to our fathers. How we maintain it and build upon it defines us as people.

"Are you afraid of dying?"

2010-06-05T09:27:00.000-07:00

In this blog I will share with you some of the responses I have been given over the years to the question "Are you afraid of dying?" - by the (mostly elderly) subjects of my video biographies.

For me growing up, the scariest question in my mind - and the one I was much too afraid to ask my Nana - was: "Are you afraid of dying?" I don't know if I was more worried about losing her or if I feared for my own mortality. To the old though - at least the ones I have been fortunate to interview over the years, death is seldom a fearsome prospect. Which is kind of great. (It makes me wish I had screwed up enough courage all those years ago to ask my Grandma the Big Question - I bet she would have put my small mind at rest.)

For some people it seems, a sense of cosmic justice allows them to be relaxed about their own death. They may not have been highly observant in church, but they figure that if they haven't caused harm or hardship to others, then if there is a good place people go - they have earned their spot.

"No. No. I am not strongly religious. My brother and I have discussed this. We have both led a good life and we are not ashamed of what we have done in life. And if there is a hereafter... then we are going where everybody else goes." (Wally D)

For others, the question is more about the manner of one's death and a hope that their passing will not be difficult or unpleasant:

"Am I afraid of dying? I don't think so. It will come but I hope I will die in my sleep rather than having to suffer - because my husband really suffered. He wanted to go so badly.

We're all going to die, all of us. So while we are on this earth let's be kind as well." Anne G

Some folks' own near death experiences give them hope and comfort for the future. One ex-Marine told me:

"I died in 1968 - so no, I am not afraid. No. I was at the hospital and a Marine Corps MD shoved a pin into my throat and opened my trachea up. And I was a little pissed at him. Because I could see that big light down there. And I was so peaceful. I don't know how long I was like that - but here I am today." Andrew BMy husband says there is really only one important ambition in all of life - and that is to become reconciled to your own mortality. There is just no avoiding death; as the famous psychiatrist RD Laing pointed out: "Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent." Most of the folks I have interviewed for video biographies have accepted this diagnosis but achieved the ambition of personal reconciliation.

Another gentleman I interviewed last year had suffered numerous previous heart attacks and was battling an illness that it was unlikely he would beat. He drew strength from that:

"Afraid? No. I don't think so. I died, probably, a lot of times already. Maybe this will be it, you know? I am thinking that if the kids just remember me being happy, then that would be just fine." Stan F

A belief in God comforts many, many people. Anne K would die less than a week after she said this to me:

"I have great faith in my church and my God... And that's another thing I would hope the children would recognize: That there is a Power ahead of us that's above us and below us and all around us and f you pray, do the good things, it will come to you. But you have to have a faith which is unbounding". (Anne K)

And this from a former clergyman:

"No I am not. He who accepts the Lord Jesus Christ as his savior will be saved. Salvation is there - God has promised us that." Jim P

Some folks are just too busy to worry too much about death:

"No. When you go you go. Could happen in the next 10 seconds or the next 10 years so why should I worry about it? Worrying is a waste of effort." Roger W

Not everybody I have interviewed was totally relaxed about the subject (but at least they are keeping their sense of humor):

"I am not keen about it (laughs). I don't like the part where they shut you up in a box ... I could ask for a glass top with a door bell inside so if I come to after a week or so I can notify somebody that, hey I am in here! I don't see that you really die dead... So I am a little perplexed about dying." Charlotte M

A number of older people I have worked with passed away this year - some before I had a chance to prepare their video biography. (Only this week I got the very sad news that a very kind man I had interviewed some years ago was battling a terrible illness and was likely to pass very soon - and could I prepare a funeral slideshow. Thankfully for the family, his video biography was already completed.) So the subject of death has been much on my mind lately.

It is comforting to know that for most of us reaching the end of our years, we will be ready. We will fight the good fight and we will "rage against the dying of the light". But the inevitable result will not trouble us - as it has not troubled so many of the wise folks that I have had the privilege so far to interview.

Family History in the Digital Age: Plus ça change...

2010-05-22T10:50:00.000-07:00

The digital age has changed almost everything we do, from shopping to traveling to staying in touch. And the pace of digital change is not showing any signs of slowing. But some things never change - the need to shop and travel and our need to stay in touch. Our interest in genealogy and family history has not changed either - if anything its the opposite. What has changed is the way we research family history - and how we share our findings.

In this blog I am going to share the story of one woman who has embraced the new digital tools and told her own family story that goes back many generations.

First off, on the research side, Ancestry.com - the premier on-line family history resource site - now boasts over 4 billion documentary records in their database. Four Billion! One of the most popular searches on Ancestry.com is the search of early 20th Century Census records - they almost always turn up interesting tidbits. (I did some research this week for a video biography and discovered that the subject's mother's age was - in truth - 3 years older than she had always said!)

As many genealogy and family history resources as there are on the web, a whole lot more information is still tied up in old county records. County courthouses have been the repositories of record for centuries. What kind of records? Court records like divorces, name changes, naturalizations, adoptions, and civil suits; Vital records like births, deaths and marriages; Estate records like wills, administrations, bond books, accounts, and guardianship records; Land records like deeds, mortgages, survey and plat books Genealogy Video: Courthouse Secrets.

Few of us can reach back and connect as readily to our ancestors as a recent client Susan P. She is a graduate of Oberlin College - just like her husband, parents, and all 4 grandparents. Can you believe that? Susan became a librarian and her career spanned carbon paper to WiFi. And being a librarian, she wanted to make sure that not just her story - but the story of her ancestors would be accessible and interesting to her grandchildren.

The good news for Susan was that on the sharing side, the digital age presents endless opportunities to share the results of family history research with blogs, personal and public websites, and on-line magazines and hub pages. Not to mention all the opportunities that now exist to share family history video: Genealogy Video is Taking Genealogy to a New Level.

Interest in genealogy and family history are a long tradition with Susan's kin and successive generations have documented their lives with diaries and personal histories. Add a rich photographic record and in Susan's hands those past generations were guaranteed to live well into the future. Susan decided to use historical family images uploaded to a photo sharing site to explain some of the history of her remarkable family:

The digital age certainly presents many choices in how we choose to showcase our family history research. I wrote an article recently comparing the advantages and disadvantages of written, audio and video memoirs: Personal History Biography: Audio, Video or Written Memoir? Written memoirs are as popular as ever, and with the option now of self-publishing the results in attractive and reasonably priced books this method of preserving family history will remain a great option.

Voice recording is another great way to record personal history - and with the help of iTunes it is now easy to turn your audio tracks of the family story into CDs and iPod fodder. Some people mix these audio recordings into their iPod play lists and enjoy the voices of history speaking to them among their own favorite songs!

Naturally I have a bias towards video - because of all the media it is the most personal, immediate and comprehensive. Video is able to capture the personality of the subject - although there are certainly more technical challenges in putting it all together.

As I wrote elsewhere recently, there was a time when family history was the preserve of the maiden aunts. To hear the stories we had to suffer through best china and arm chair doilies and endless digressions on medical procedures suffered by even older and more distant relatives (or worse, totally unheard of acquaintances). The stories would come - between polite sips of tea and in a miasma of perfume and powder. As a means of enlisting the interest of the younger generations, it didn't have a lot going for it.

Today's younger generations are more interested in family history than ever before. The whole country is. But they are demanding that those maiden aunts (and all the rest of us who fulfill the function of "family historian") get with the times. They want their family history accessible and they want it compelling: Family History in the Digital Age: Fine China and Lace Doilies Begone!

Although the tools to research and showcase family history have changed, our interest in it has not. The more things change, the more they stay the same as the French saying has it. Genealogy is going from strength to strength in the new digital age. But the challenge for all of us who fulfill the role of family historians is to get with the times. We have an opportunity like never before to to enroll the interest of our children and grandchildren and our nieces and our nephews by using the new tools that are now available. Just like Susan did.

Frying Pan to Fire: War Ending Veterans' Videos

2010-05-08T09:10:00.000-07:00

Today is an important anniversary. Rewind 65 years from today and the war in Europe has officially ended. But for American soldiers still serving, joy that their battles are over is tinged by fear: Fear that they will be put on ships bound not for America but for the Pacific - and the war still raging there.

"The celebration went on for two days. Bus and train service in and out of London was halted, as more than a million people entered the city, jamming streets and blocking traffic…Memories of these tumultuous days will be rekindled as Britain observes the 65th anniversary of V-E Day on May 8.” LA Times: Day of Days

Not only will British memories be rekindled. According to the US Census, fighting in the Second World War were more than 16 million Americans – around 12 million of those seeing service overseas. Around a million Americans were killed or wounded. Today, there are about 2 million WWII veterans still alive – median age 87 – but they are dying at around one thousand per day.

Wisely, some veterans have preserved their stories including these three from Southern California: Veterans Video: Three Stories From This Vanishing Breed

The popular conception of the end of the war in Europe is one of wild celebration. Most of us have seen the old footage of the parades in London and New York's Times Square. And there is no denying the enormous relief on the battle fields and around the globe that followed the fall of Hitler and the Nazi regime. (Relief accompanied by horror as the news filtered through of the US liberation of Buchenwald Concentration Camp and the British liberation of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp.)

No soldier would say that the end of the war in Europe was any small thing. But for many of the soldiers still serving there, the formal declaration of victory had been expected. Some veterans remember the end of the war as a definite anti-climax. In the context of those times, no big thing, as this veteran's video attests:

The relief felt by soldiers at the news of the end of the war in Europe was tinged by other concerns. How soon can we go home? How will be get back? How many of us will they want to look after the millions of prisoners? What am I going to do when I get back? Will my girl still be waiting?

But pressing on the minds of many of the soldiers still in Europe was an even bigger concern: would they be needed to help defeat the Japanese? Sure, Hitler was dead but Tojo and Hirohito were not. And as bad as the war in Europe had been, by soldierly reputation, the war in the Pacific was somehow more horrific.

So the end of the war in Europe was welcome but was accompanied by a foreboding among soldiers that it might be out of the frying pan into the fire. Certainly for those soldiers in the Pacific, experience in battles like Tarawa and later Okinawa proved that such fears were justified. End would come soon to that war too, but not before both sides experienced a kind of hell - as this veteran's video suggests:

The dropping of the atomic bomb is something that most veterans have no qualms with. As terrible as its consequences were, it saved countless American lives in a war not of America's making. And stories of the manic defense by the Japanese, kamikaze attacks on ships, the specter of drowning or death by immolation onboard ship, the heat and humidity and fevers, the refusal of Japanese soldiers to surrender, the unofficial “no prisoners” policy of both sides, had all led to a feeling among soldiers - wherever stationed - that any and all means had to be used to end that war also.

So rewind 65 years today. The war in Europe has ended and the war in the Pacific has another two months to go. There are still some 2 million American veterans of the Second World War who remember those events with a frisson that we, of the next generations, can only ask about.

Many of the families of these veterans are making sure that the stories and experiences of their loved ones are being preserved. And I am often asked, “What is the best way to record the life stories of veterans?” The choice includes written memoirs, audio and video: Personal History Biography: Audio, Video or Written Memoir?

My recommendation is usually a veterans' video - for its immediacy and ability to convey the emotion as well as the facts of the story. But whatever method you choose, record your veteran's story soon.

"Daddy, what did you do all your life?"

2010-04-23T15:08:00.000-07:00

My kids are currently studying for their end of year high school exams. A teachers' strike here in Southern California has meant that they have been home for the last two days - and will probably be home Monday too. So I have been helping them review. Not in math, they outpaced me there some time ago. But I am helping them review in history. One is studying European History and the other World History and both cover the Industrial Revolution.

And it got me thinking: We owe a lot of benefits to the Industrial Revolution, but making a mystery of how we spend most of our waking hours should not be one of them.

The Industrial Revolution started in England around 1750. One of its outcomes was an increase in the production of goods - textiles at first, then other products. And the consequences of all that have been mostly good - more products, cheaper prices, jobs, greater overall prosperity. But there has been another consequence of the whole factory system, a cost you might say, whose impact is harder to measure.

Because the Industrial Revolution was also a domestic revolution. It brought a halt to the "putting out" system under which production was carried out in the home. And it coincided with the "enclosure movement" which shut the ancestral fields to farm workers and forced them to go to the towns to look for work. Increasingly, "work" was something that had to take place some place else.

Families, which before the Industrial Revolution had been poorer but more cohesive - afterwards became richer but fractured. Some parenting experts believe that for all the good that the factory system did for the economy and general prosperity, it was a giant step backwards for parenting. Kids were no longer raised by their parents - skills and values were no longer passed along as children followed the plow or sat by the loom. Instilling knowledge became outsourced, as all of society became more specialized.

Course, in the early days, the children had the "privilege" of working in the factory right alongside their parents (and often chained to machines). When that ended, the split in the family was complete. Mother would typically stay at home - no longer engaged in paid work - and Father would troop off, often leaving before dawn and returning well after dark, to make money at some far off place.

Fast forward to today. Things haven't changed all that much - except perhaps that more women now follow their husbands out of the house each day for paid work. And the children go in their own direction.

So a connection between generations has been broken. And more than one child has wondered, if not always asked, "Daddy, what did you do all your life?". (And over the previous decades it most often was the man who spent the most time out of the house.) "Work", is the obvious answer - and the conversation does not always go much further.

Sadly, when it comes time to reflecting on life - and preparing memoirs - many of us pay scant attention to the decades we spent working. Maybe because we feel that we have already robbed our partners and families of so much time away, best not to make it worse. (I seldom come across a retired man who does not regret so much time spent away - it can become a source of guilt.) Added to that is that "work" can be complex - it goes on in an industry, within systems, requires a vocabulary, and often even some technical explanation.But business stories hold an important place in our family histories. Because for most of us, work is more than the sale of our physical and intellectual energies. It is a career, a business, a field where our powers were tested, a place where we built and created, a world where we formed alliances and built relationships, an arena where we strove and succeeded - and sometimes faltered. It was the source of much of the family's wealth and prosperity.

The career story and the business profile needs to come out into the open and takes its place among the other topics more often covered in memoir. And it was in recognition of this that we formerly launched a new product line this week: the video business biography: Tools Down, Camera Up: Video Business Biography Launched.

Work was and is a big part of life. And we need to have a better answer to the question "Daddy, what did you do all your life?". The better answer for many retired entrepreneurs and business folks will be a video business biography recording the ups and downs and the strivings and struggles that filled the best years of their lives.

We owe a lot of things to the Industrial Revolution, but making a mystery of how we spent most of our waking hours is not one of them.

Video biography - closest thing to immortality. Here's how

2010-04-10T08:54:00.000-07:00

Over the last 18 months or so, I have attempted to convey how thrilling it is to preserve a life in a video biography. Through the essays on this blog, I have tried to enthuse, cajole, lecture, and instruct folks on how to go about making life story videos. Why? Because they are the closet thing we have to immortality. A written memoir is a great thing; and an audio recording is always a treasure. But nothing can capture a personality, a person, like a life preserved on video.

And over the last 18 months or so, I have tried to say that none of us should let the goal of perfection be the enemy of the good (as Voltaire said) - or, just do it (Nike). In other words, don't take all year planning. Start first, then plan later. Lives do not last forever - we just sometimes act like they do.

I have also tried to present options for folks who get the idea. There are professionals (like me) who can assist in putting a video biography together. And you can do it yourself using the tools and advice close at hand. In this post, I am going to give you some links to on-line resources for your own immortality project.

Video interviews
First off, you can make your own life story documentary. There is simple, easy to follow advice available about making a video biography on your own, including advice about camera and camera set up and positioning as well as advice on sound and interview questions. The point is that it is not hard to make a life story video, it really isn't:

You'll need a camera. Any old digital video camera lying around is fine. It really is. The problem in most amateur video is not the quality of the camera. It's usually the sound and all the shaking. Luckily, we can fix all that for under $50 (even less if you can borrow the stuff).

So that should take care of the video part and the interview of your subject. Now, it will add significantly to the impact of your life story video if you can cut to relevant photographs from time to time. Those images may be family pictures or they may be archive images that relate to the historical period that the person lived through.

Old photographs
Like capturing interview material, you won't have a problem preparing pictures to include in the video biography with just a small amount of guidance. The main issue here are the best settings for scanning old photographs and documents. I run across a lot of people who struggle with the the interplay of size and scanner resolution settings. My advice? If you are scanning photos use these scanner settings. In short:

The choice you make will depend on whether you intend to use your pictures on computer screens and monitors; or if you will want to print them. Print requires 300 dpi to reproduce the original at the same size (see box illustration for effect of different print resolutions for different size originals). Your average PC has a default resolution of 96 dpi. So use these settings for those uses. If you are going to email or post the images, scan at 96 dpi. If you will want to print, scan at 300 dpi to get an image the same size as the original.

Once you have your life story video images safely scanned, you will want to spruce them up a tad. And there are simple tips for retouching digital images:

Digital images tend to suffer from the same problems time and time again. And most of those problems have been with us from the days of film. The difference now is that with digital photography, and all the free or cheap digital imaging software, you can do something about them.

Video editing
Fast forward: With video and images now captured, you will be well on your way to completing your video biography. The final stage is where you assemble all the elements together. If you have ever used PowerPoint you will have a good instinctive basis for video editing. But you will need to open up an editing program. If, like most people, you use a PC then you will want to know how to edit video on a pc:

One thing about this tech revolution is that we now have more technology than many of us know how to use! And that applies to video and video editing on your PC. I am willing to bet that you have all the gizmos and gadgets you need to turn raw family footage into something snappier.

And you do. On the PC, the program is Movie Maker - it is free - and it is really easy.

Other elements
As you go along, you will want to include other elements in your video biography. It's not hard to think what - we see documentaries on TV all the time and most of what you see - like archive footage, titles and captions, music, is well within your reach. There really is no limit to what you can include in a life story video.

If you are a DIYer, do stick with it. Poke around the web and get other advice. Stay on mission - it is an important one. Probably one of the most important family projects you will ever have. Because video biography is the closest thing we have to immortality.

Veterans' Video Biographies

2010-03-27T17:49:00.000-07:00

This week's release of "The Pacific" - the Spielberg/Hanks' HBO 10-part veterans video about ordinary soldiers fighting the Japanese in WWII - puts the spotlight back on "The Greatest Generation". With around a thousand WWII war veterans now dying every day, it also challenges us to ask if we are doing enough to save our own families' old soldiers' stories. For some of us, the answer will be a veteran's video.

How do you tell the story of a war? Thucydides and Xenophon wrote of kings and campaigns and the rising glory of the ancient Greeks. And ever since those heroic times, the "great man" theory of history has largely held sway. But battles are fought by ordinary men and women; and especially since the 20th Century, sacrifice and destruction in war have been painfully shared by all of society. So a narrative which focuses on the generals and politicians running the show isn't quite the full picture.

As a result, recent documentary and dramatic programs have focused on the soldier (think "Band of Brothers", "Saving Private Ryan") and on the home front (think Ken Burns' "The War"). And this is how it should be. The larger purpose of battles and war must never be ignored, we must be clear on the geography, and the political leadership deserves air time - but it is the story of the common soldier which commands our attention. Because the common soldier is us - our brothers and sisters, our parents and grandparents. Their sacrifice is our sacrifice.

And so the latest veterans' video - The Pacific - carries on this new, more democratic, movement and the stories it tells are based on the real life experiences of actual soldiers serving during the Second World War in the 1st Division. And for many old soldiers in the audience the video will bring back painful memories of terrible privations and lost comrades. And it will raise the question of whether we have done enough to preserve the stories of the veterans close to us.

Some people have already sat down with the old soldiers in their family and made a veterans video biography recording their stories: the fear, the boredom, the weary perambulations, and the occasional glory of war experience. These can be done at home with a minimum of fuss and technology; or there are people - like me - specializing in this kind of work who produce something a little more elaborate with carefully researched interviews with war veterans, combined with personal and archive images, maps and even narration: Veterans Video.

And since 2007, The Veterans History Project - an initiative of the Library of Congress and the American Folklore Center - has been collecting, preserving, and making available the personal accounts of all American war veterans "so that future generations may hear directly from veterans and better understand the realities of war". The Project encourages the submission of personal accounts, veterans audio, veterans video, written memoirs and photos and documents. And they provide a "Field Kit" to assist interviews and a "Memoir Guidelines" for those veterans writing their own account. The Veterans History Project also welcomes stories from the "home front".

You may watch the new WWII series "The Pacific" - $200 million for its making - and marvel at the sublime agony of battle, and the day-to-day challenge of surviving on hot, barren, volcanic islands whose names are largely forgotten and whose locations the folks at home - and even some serving - only ever had a sketchy idea about. And your thoughts might turn to the veterans in your own family. Recording a veterans video biography honors old soldiers and creates a valuable family history documentary. And when you take the trouble to send that veterans video biography to the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress, that old soldier's story will take its rightful place in our Nation's Archives. You will have saved an Old Soldier - for ever more.

Time for an ethical will

2010-03-13T12:15:00.000-08:00

With the approach of the April 15 tax filing deadline, many of us will be wondering what our most valuable legacy will really be. As we pull out the receipts and dig through the files, some of us will give thought to an ethical will - a place to hand on your most important treasure: your values and your wisdom.

An ethical will is a personal, more spiritual message than what you would include in your estate will, and might cover topics such as:

Your thoughts and feelings about life

The lessons you’ve learned

Important messages you want to pass on to family, friends and future generations

Your values in life

An understanding that may be easier to say in print than in person

Your final summation of the life you have lived and the people who made it worthwhile

You may ask and provide forgiveness. Through an Ethical Will, you pass on your values, not your valuables. You share the voice of your heart and the legacy of your spirit.

The desire to pass on more than possessions goes back thousands of years and is recorded in the Old Testament. President Obama may be the most famous, contemporary, and youngest writers of an ethical will with his letter to his daughters:

I hope both of you will take up (this) work, righting the wrongs that you see and working to give others the chances you've had. Not just because you have an obligation to give something back to this country that has given our family so much -- although you do have that obligation. But because you have an obligation to yourself. Because it is only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you will realize your true potential.

The ethical will has also featured in fiction and film. In the movie My Life, Michael Keaton has everything going for him - until he learns he is terminally ill. The ethical will on video that he creates for his unborn child is both funny, highly affecting and a voyage of discovery for his character. Well worth looking at.

Another example of an ethical will in cinema is the 1978 Superman film with Christopher Reeve. In that movie, Superman's father is forced to send his child to another planet (Earth). He sends along with him a green crystal - which is like a super-duper DVD. When Supe is older, that magic crystal tells him the story of his heritage and what he can expect of life. He is able to learn what his responsibilities will be living among us poor benighted human kind.

In the real world, an ethical is not very different to the one Supe's Dad packed for him. But, instead of those crystals, we have - of course - the video camera, DVDs and ethical wills on video. Five Steps to a Video Ethical Will.

Through your ethical will, you can: Share messages to future generations; Share what you value; Express your hopes and dreams; Give advice; Tell stories; Share lessons you’ve learned in life and advice; Seek and give forgiveness; Express love and understanding; and Show who you are as a person.

An Ethical Will can be made at any time, not just at the end of life. While there is more urgency when there is a serious illness, or advanced age, it can also be created at other milestones in life, such as the marriage of a child and/or birth of a grandchild.

Interested in reading more? National non-profit CancerCare offers a four page guide: "Sharing Memories, Values and Hopes". It's in PDF and you can download it by searching for it at the www.cancercare.org website.

An ethical will is not a legal document and is not intended to bind descendants. But it can be recorded in writing - in a document or a book. An ethical will can also be recorded to video; and I have been privileged to assist a number of people with ethical wills on video.

Don't let tax time come and go without giving some thought to your most important treasure - your values and your wisdom.

And for professionals: make sure you consider ethical wills when helping your client plan for retirement and their passing: Ethical Wills: The Missing Piece of Estate Planning.

Roots Television; Genealogy goes mainstream

2010-02-27T13:52:00.000-08:00

Note: an earlier edition of this blog announced that Roots Television was to close. Due to popular demand (and with some "tinkering under the hood") it will stay open.

In 2006, Megan Smolenyak introduced her new, tech-age genealogy website:

Whether you’re an archives hound, a scrapbooker, a cousin collector, a roots-travel enthusiast, a Civil War re-enactor, a DNA fan, a reunion instigator, a sepia-toned photos zealot, an Internet-junkie, a history buff, an old country traditions follower, a cemetery devotee, a story-teller, a multicultural food aficionado, a flea market and antiques fanatic, a family documentarian, a nostalgia nut, or a mystery-solver, Roots Television™ has something for you -- and that “something” is quality programming.

Thus Roots Television began. And in its three short years, the site has fulfilled its promise and become the go-to place for genealogy and family history related video.

Roots Television has helped genealogy become mainstream. I mentioned Faces of America last week and even Lisa Simpson from the Fox Television show 'The Simpsons' has caught the family history bug, prompting the headline: "Roots TV Becomes New Branch of Reality TV".

And, starting Friday March 5th, NBC will be premiering (after what seems like a long delay) Who Do You Think You Are? Talk about going mainstream! Check out this episode featuring Vanessa Williams:

As well as Brooke Shields (who - it turns out - is descended from French royalty), the new show also features Spike Lee, Susan Sarandon, Matthew Broderick and other notables. And it looks marvelous. Although, as one grumpy person comments on the NBC blog:

All very well showing stars researching their family but what about us commoners who have a long line of agricultural laborers and lace makers as ancestors and have to wait weeks to get a certificate and pay ... for the privilege?

Luckily, there is a place to go for help with your own genealogy video when you are not a superstar. Thank you Roots Television for helping Genealogy and Family History out into the sunlight (and the marketplace). Roots Television is alive and well; long live roots television.

Just getting started with your own genealogy video? Courthouses are a great place to start: Genealogy Video: Courthouse Secrets

"We are the sum of all the people who lived before us"

2010-02-13T13:00:00.000-08:00

So says Meryl Streep in Faces of America - a new PBS show tracing the family history of 12 prominent Americans - that started this week. If you missed the first episode, you can watch the whole thing right here. Yo-Yo Ma, Elizabeth Alexander, Malcolm Gladwell, Eva Longoria and others all hear about and tell about their family histories in a beautiful and faultless series put together by Henry Gates Jr. (yes, that Henry Gates Jr.)

You can catch the next episode on TV this coming Wednesday - set those DVRs!

If there is a unifying theme to Faces in America it may be that "ancestors matters". As Stephen Colbert says on hearing for the first time about some of his ancestors, "They come all around me...I feel like I am surrounded by other people now".

This sense of enhanced identity and feeling of belonging to something deeper and wider than our immediate family is a common dividend from learning about one's family history. Another dividend, which often comes after hearing about our ancestors' labors, failures, and eventual survival - is strength; the strength to bear our own daily burdens knowing what our forebears suffered with and endured.

In our video biography work, we often hear wonderful stories of immigrant struggle and success. And we often hear the more difficult accounts of personal struggle, of difficult decisions, of compromises and regrets. In all cases we see people achieve a new level of understanding and a greater appreciation for our common humanity. Faces in America is lovely to watch - all the more so because it features some of America's most thoughtful, charismatic and successful individuals. It remains to be seen if the show can convert more ordinary Americans to do their own research and learn about their own families - and experience that same sense of surprise, delight and wonder.

It would be a shame if people take from the show the message that famous people have the most interesting back stories. Don't they have more of everything else? Well, our own experience recording life stories to video is that every family tree has surprise and intrigue (check this video memoir example from a project we completed a little time back called "Alyce D's Armenian Roots - Video Memoir").

But you need to make the start - not everyone has Henry Gates Jr. to do the work for them. (You do need to be famous to have that happen!)

But let another celebrity - one who was not featured on the show (but perhaps should have been) - sum it up best:

When a parent dies, it's the end. I always wanted to chronicle the family history with my mother. She was always interested in that ...but my mother was a little antsy about it. I know she would've gotten into it. It would have been okay with my father, too. But I wasn't forceful, and I didn't make it happen. That's one regret I have. I didn't get as much of the family history as I could have for the kids. Robert De Niro: Esquire: What I've Learned

As fun to watch as Faces in America unquestionably is, our verdict is this: personal and family history is not just a spectator sport!

iPhone, iTalk, iTouch: Personal history in our high tech world

2010-01-29T10:43:00.000-08:00

Have you seen the video promoting the new Apple iPad? There's a great bit showing someone on their sofa holding the device - and fondly looking at photos of the kids - which were probably just emailed directly to the iPad. All done wirelessly. The possibilities for personal history and recording stories in all these new gizmos and gadgets are practically endless.

Personal history on the iPod
Do you have an iPod? Any old iPod? Did you know you can record personal history stories to it? You don't need a special digital recorder nowadays to record voices. And you can certainly throw that old cassette tape recorder in the trash. Just plug a mic into your iPod (the Griffin iTalk microphone gets good reviews) and away you go.

Let's say you are visiting Grandma. She has just put aside her own iPad to visit a while with you (although her eyes keep darting back to the device - she's anxious to take it up again). She starts reminiscing about the old days. You, of course, have your iPod in your pocket (you drove up with it playing on your car stereo). You ease it out and say, "Hey Granny, what great stories you have. Mind if I record you talking about the time you met Grampsy?"

Of course she says yes.

Halfway through, Granny mentions a box of old photos she has in the dresser and asks you to fetch it down. You go through the box. Boy, Granny really had it going on back in the day. These swimsuit shots are something else.

You think to yourself: I should get copies of these photos. But you realize something: Darn. I wish I'd brought a scanner. Even my digital camera would have done the job.

Cell phones can be "Johnny on the spot"
Wait! All is not lost. Who doesn't have a cell phone these days? (You check your other pocket.) Cell phones have been able to take photos for some time now. You may have an in-built camera and not even realize it (or you may not know how to use it - yet). Some cell phones can now take pictures up to 5MB in size - and some even have an auto focus function.

Newer cell phones can even record video. Video! Google's Nexus One can record thirty minutes of biography video at full screen resolution! So can Motorola's Droid. Lot's of cell phones now do video. And once you are done, you can upload right to YouTube or send the clip along by email.

OK. You're determined not to let Granny be The Life That Got Away. You're not sure when you will be able to get back and visit. With her permission, you decide to video record her with your cell phone - you had it all along. (You decide to shoot the action over her shoulder, her gnarled hands roughly shuffling the pictures, and her mind and voice drifting down memory lane).

Then a bump. Grandma's stuck. She can't remember the unit Grampsy served in during WWII. "It doesn't matter", you say, and pat her hand a little condescendingly. She fixes you with that stern glare that used to paralyze you when you were a girl.

iPad rides to the rescue
"OK. Pass the iPad," you say. "I'll look it up." She reluctantly hands it across and in a few screen touches you are surfing the web, landing on ancestry.com, and looking at Grampsy's original registration card for the draft and his army enlistment record. That's his handwriting alright.

No one has left the living room. Or even gotten up from the sofa.

It's a great time to be alive. It's a great time to be a personal historian. It's a great time to be doing personal history in our high tech world. Embrace the technology: Family History in the Digital Age: Fine China and Lace Doilies Begone!

Postcript
Another way our hitec world is having an impact on personal history is through the emergence of social networking sites. Children lost for decades are reconnecting with birth parents and siblings on Facebook. And families are finding cousins and ancestors they never new they had on ancestry.com, to name just two examples.

Some older folks are getting into the social network game (and why not?) and keeping up with kids and grandkids who may be living in other cities, other states, and even other countries. Here is an example of a 92 year old lady who stays connected with her family on Facebook, as her personal documentary made in early 2011 shows.

What questions should you ask in a video biography interview?

2010-01-09T12:44:00.000-08:00

Let's say you have finally gotten around to sitting down with a family member whose life story video you have been meaning to record. You have a video camera (or tape recorder) whirring - the mic. is in place. Your subject has a glass of water, the dog has been banished to the back porch, you lean forward - smile - and open your mouth to speak. What do you ask?

First of all, well done for getting the job started! Second, there really is no such thing as a bad interview. The answers to any questions you think to ask will be a treasure for future generations - not just for the verbal information that is generated but for the personality and individuality which cannot but show through when a person speaks. This is a kind of magic.

Now, before I get to lists of specific questions, let me ask some questions of (ahem) myself which reflect my experience interviewing subjects for biography projects on video.

Here goes:

Is it a good idea to interview people together? Yes, especially couples. Subjects relax more quickly and the responses are usually more lively. But take the time to interview the subject(s) alone afterwards. People are often more candid one-on-one.

What about pre-interviews? Essential. You need to know the broad outlines of the story. But do it at least a week prior to the recorded interview - otherwise the subject will be saying, "As I told you before...".

Props? It's always a good idea to have keepsakes or photos on hand to pass across and ask about. Spend some time inquiring about items around the home that are obviously treasured.

Location? The subject's home, whenever possible (see "Props" above). The subject will be more relaxed and you can gather important and personal items to help compose your background (assuming you are video recording the interview). But don't confine the interview to one spot only.

How long should each session be? I must admit to being a bit of a hard task-master here. If the interview is going well I just press on! Talking excites and energizes a lot of people - including me (memo to self: break for lunch, break for lunch). Best answer: be sensitive to the needs of your subject.

What about the sensitive questions? Ask them, but leave these to later in the interview.

What if shocking things come out? I always check later with the subject to ensure that they are comfortable with the disclosure. They almost always are: One of the pleasures of interviewing older folks is their level of honesty and their lack of pretense.

What do you do when answers go on too long? Nothing.

"What, where and when" or "how and why"? "What where and when" questions get at the life's chronology - you need them for the narrative. "How and why questions" are potentially much more interesting, revealing motivations and decision points. Make sure you have plenty of both.

Can I ask leading questions? A "leading question" in the law of evidence is a question that suggests it's own answer or that can be answered by "yes" or "no". They should be avoided - unless you know there is a story there and the subject has plain forgotten!

Should I care about dead air (silence)? Actually, you should use it. Social creatures that we are, many of us are uncomfortable with silence and rush to fill it. Waiting after an answer has apparently finished often furnishes important additional information. If you do not plan to edit the interview then, with an eye to your future audience, you will not want to let the dead air to last too long.

Should the interviewer be part of the interview or should they try and stay invisible? Some video biography pros have the questions on cards or on a teleprompter to cut out the (potentially distracting) presence of the interviewer altogether. Others try to edit out the questions later. At the opposite end of the spectrum, other people promote the role of the interviewer by shooting wide shots (showing the two people) and even cutting in reaction shots of the interviewer. It's a personal choice.

What about catch-all questions? Another secret weapon. After I finish a topic, I always ask, "What else about [the current topic] is it important for people to know?"

Anything else? Good question - you're learning! Don't be afraid to ask too much. If the subject recalls a song, a poem or even a dance - ask them to sing, recite or dance it!

OK. Specifics. Here are some places to go to help you formulate your own questions. They are just a place to start. When you turn on that recorder, get ready to go with the flow and see where it leads!

Storycorps has questions organized by subject (e.g. friend, parent) and by topic. They are not afraid to have you ask the difficult questions. Here are Storycorps questions for subjects with a serious illness:

Can you tell me about your illness?
Do you think about dying? Are you scared?
How do you imagine your death?
Do you believe in an after-life?
Do you regret anything?
Do you look at your life differently now than before you were diagnosed?
Do you have any last wishes?
If you were to give advice to me or my children, or even children to come in our family, what would it be?
What have you learned from life? The most important things?
Has this illness changed you? What have you learned?
How do you want to be remembered?

Jewishgen has another great list of questions - especially suited for inquiring about previous generations. Here are their suggested questions for finding out about a grandfather:

21. What kind of work did your grandfather do?
22. Will you describe your grandfather? What did he look like? What kind of personality did he have? Did he influence you in any way? How?
23. Are you like him in any way?
24. Do you know how he died? When did he die? Where is he buried?
25. Can you tell me a story about either your grandmother or grandfather that would characterize her--perhaps something she did, or the way she reacted to something that happened to her or some member of her family?
26. How did your grandmother and grandfather meet?
27. Were there any family heirlooms/property, etc. that have been handed down from generation to generation? What are they? Where are they now?
28. Can you think of anything else about your grandparents?

About.com provide 50 questions especially focused on the subject themselves, popular culture and the world around. For example:

16. Do you remember any fads from your youth? Popular hairstyles? Clothes?
17. Who were your childhood heroes?
18. What were your favorite songs and music?
19. Did you have any pets? If so, what kind and what were their names?
20. What was your religion growing up? What church, if any, did you attend?
21. Were you ever mentioned in a newspaper?
22. Who were your friends when you were growing up?
23. What world events had the most impact on you while you were growing up? Did any of them personally affect your family?

There are many other links to helpful resources but that's your start. And if you need some tips getting organized for video, look at this blog. And this will help you capture photographs.

Congratulations for getting this far and happy interviewing!

The benefits of telling a life story

2009-12-20T16:40:00.000-08:00

A call from a journalist last week got me thinking about the benefits of telling a life story.

Over the years, I have found there are many benefits when people record their stories -

1. It values, honors, and validates the teller - both during the process and after it.

2. It establishes a link with future generations - helping to bring wisdom; and a sense of identity, belonging and value to those generations.

3. It grants the teller the gift of completeness in their lives and allows them to counsel, entertain or explain events to those who follow.

4. It fosters communication and understanding between the teller and their family and friends; difficult topics are often broached and even resolved.

5. The process often becomes a pleasurable occupation and hobby for those concerned, giving a sense of excitement, purpose and mission and pride in the result.

6. For people with Alzheimer's and like conditions, the story can become a kind of external hard drive for the teller and those close.

Can you think of some others?

I know some people just feel unburdened and relieved when they record their life story video with Your Story Here. Recording you life story - in one way or another - on most people's list isn't it? If you would like to look at some case studies and samples of folks who have successfully preserved their stories to video, then visit Your Story Here Life Story Video.

One more thing. Never take no for an answer if you are considering recording a life story video. Sadly, over the course of many years, I have seen many occasions where the family was preparing to interview an older member of their family only to be derailed by the tragic death of the subject. As I wrote in an article recently: Life Story Video - Never Take No For an Answer.

New glasses helped Jerry see the Invisible

2009-12-19T10:07:00.000-08:00

A slight change for this week's blog: Jerry McFarland writes about his Christmas 1959.

Two weeks before Christmas in 1959, when I was eight years old, I was told I had poor vision. Surprised. I thought I could see just fine. Then came eye glasses, and my world changed forever.

That day would be like no other, for now all within my sight was alive. Like opening a chest of polished stones, wet after a new spring rain, light sparkled and danced on edges cut fine with detail. Trees had leaves, form and texture! Intricate lines and shading appeared where none were before.

The writing in my school books no longer appeared to be black abstract forms. I could even see the wrinkles in Mrs. Robinson’s face. I never knew she looked so old! Nothing was opaque or non-descript. Atoms and molecules, electric with vibration, mixed with colors of turquoise and blue and jumped off the glossy National Geographic page. A book of images taken by Ansel Adams, given me by grandma, was foreboding and strange; yet the eerie shadows fascinated and intrigued me. The desert rocks, arched canyons and streams were beautiful. It seemed as if I could touch and feel these objects with my new eyes. I had never known such a visual feast!

Then for a moment, I became sad as I reflected on all that had previously escaped my sight. How much was there that I had not seen, and what had I missed?

Joy soon replaced sadness, for now I had my new eyes. I had new purpose. I would never shut my eyes, I thought. And I wondered, how many other things do we believe are non-existent simply because our eyes do not see them? And in that crystalline moment, I felt certain there must be so many things human eyes cannot see that are real.

I pondered God’s miracles; what of angels, Jesus, and the devil? Maybe even Santa Claus and the elves were there, but just beyond my sight! It was no longer what I could see, but that which I could not! I was certain that most of what could not be seen, was good stuff: like Jesus and Santa!

I gave thanks to God for my new glasses. I was certain this was to be the best Christmas ever!

Jerry McFarland is a gifted musician, songwriter and recording artist who also turns his talents to writing. Songs from his latest CD, "Voices from the Attic" can be heard on Jerry's MySpace page and purchased on iTunes.

Life stories and family history can be preserved in all kinds of ways: Personal History Biography: Audio, Written or Video Memoir?

"Every child deserves a great future..."

2009-12-05T12:07:00.000-08:00

At a time when most small businesses are cutting back and watching their pennies, we have decided to make the biggest gift in our history! We are donating a full-length, custom produced, personal history documentary to be auctioned live at the Thirteenth Annual Gala Teddy Bear Ball to be held on Monday December 7, at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

Actually, the decision to donate was easy. The Help Group serves children with special needs related to autism, Asperger's disorder, learning disabilities, ADHD, mental retardation, abuse and emotional problems. It is the largest nonprofit organization of its kind in the United States.

The Help Group's motto is: 'Because every child deserves a great future…'

We specialize in producing custom personal and family history films. All the stories we record represent the successful futures that the subjects managed to achieve. For kids with special needs, there may not be any successful futures - without the help of organizations like The Help Group.

Does a donation of this magnitude - in these tough times - sting just a little bit? Not even a little. Despite these dismal economic times, we are finishing our busiest year on record. It seems that people are turning to the important things in life. Like family, and honoring and remembering loved ones. Spending money on something that will be a treasure for generations does not seem to be an issue for our clients.

I wrote a blog article about this return to core values that I am seeing in our business. It is called "It's not about the toys".

Your Story Here has now recorded more than 60 personal history documentaries, including the sprawling story of a successful Italian American family - the Giacchinos. Michael Giacchino, Hollywood composer for movies like the Incredibles, Ratatouille and Cloverfield was pretty happy with the result: "They did a great job on a pretty complicated family history. The finished product was awesome."

The Giacchino documentary (snippet above) starts with Michael's older brother John in the kitchen with their father. They are cooking home-made pasta together and arguing the merits of bottled garlic.

The importance of recording personal and family history was recognized by Robert De Niro in Esquire magazine in December 2002. In an article titled "What I've learned" he noted that when a parent died, it was the end. He said "I always wanted to chronicle the family history with my mother. She was always interested in that. I wanted some researchers I'd worked with to talk to my mother, but my mother was a little antsy about it. I know she would've gotten into it... But I wasn't forceful, and I didn't make it happen. That's one regret I have. I didn't get as much of the family history as I could have for the kids." Read more.

For those attending The Help Group Teddy Bear Gala this coming Monday, they should have no cause for the regret Robert De Niro feels. All they need to do is outbid the guy at the other table and take home a custom produced personal history documentary from Your Story Here!

Real Life Drama in Video Memoirs

2009-11-21T08:03:00.000-08:00

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!

Make your own biography or genealogy blog (video optional)

2009-11-06T16:30:00.000-08:00

Video biography is just one way to showcase your biography or genealogy work. Another excellent way is through a blog.

Most people know about blogs these days. They look and feel just like a website - only better (you're reading one!). But not everyone knows how easy they are to open and operate. Ask my 12 year old son, he even has his own blog!

So, if you have been "umming and arring" this last little while, let me give you some ideas - and some courage - for getting started. And I'll keep it simple.

First off a plug for video - it is a fine way to showcase your biography, genealogy and ancestry work, as the Italian-American Giacchino story shows.

But blogs are pretty cool too. You can pack them with info, they're free, you can email links to them and they can be accessed anywhere in the world. People can comment on what you write and you can reply, you can update daily or yearly or never, always fix errors or mistakes (even after you've posted), plus add photos or documents or video or links to your favorite websites. And, you can do it all yourself. Really. You don't need a web designer or web master - you're the driver!

Me? I like Blogger and Wordpress. These guys host the blog (i.e. take care of the technical end). Just above is the sign up screen for Blogger, which is owned by Google. (Told you it was free, and quick.) You will need to dream up a name for the blog, enter your email address, come up with a password, choose a "theme" (what the page will look like), and you are off to the races. If you have text already, you simply copy and paste it in (I always save it as plain text first).

I find WordPress a little more wordy (more PC than Mac if you know what I mean). It has more choices in themes (page looks) and it seems to give you more configuration choices. But, it probably isn't as easy for the first timer as Blogger (my 12 year old uses Blogger) and you do have to pay to add video directly to your blogs (unless you embed a link to YouTube or another video hosting site).

Now, you'll want to add widgets (Blogger-speak) or gadgets (WordPress-speak) to your blog. These are just the little doo-dads you see on the side of blogs like this one (links, recent posts, archives, labels, or "quote of the day" - check the bottom of this page - and so on). There are hundreds to choose from. My advice: stick to the classics. And experiment. (The only difference between us and the kids with all this new technology is we think we will break something - and they know you can't. It's all just zeros and ones!)

OK, you're thinking, maybe I'll give Blogger a try. But what if I get stuck? Well, you probably will get stuck at some point. Especially if you want to do the tricky stuff. Both Blogger and WordPress have very helpful search boxes where you can type in your problem or question (WordPress fractionally better here for me). And if all else fails, delete the blog and start again.

Need inspiration? There are thousands of excellent biography and genealogy blogs. A good place to start is GeneaBloggers - everything you ever wanted to know about starting and running a genealogy blog plus countless links to excellent biography and genealogy blogs. Or, click on my friends' faces on the right and follow the "links" to their blog pages, such as Grandma Austin's Diaries, 100 Years in America, Grandma's House, and The Thacker Chronicles.

So, if you have a life or family you want to celebrate, come on in - the water's fine!

By the way, I stumbled across this tidy comparison chart between Blogger and Wordpress this morning. If you've had experience with WordPress or Blogger, leave me a comment!

Jane Lehmann-Shafron co-founded Your Story Here Video Biography, a documentary production company that specializes in video biography and family history documentary. Based in Orange County CA, her award-winning films have been featured in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted on 949 742-2755 or through her website.

Heritage images from the LOC

2009-10-24T15:43:00.000-07:00

It was time for some new birthday cards to use in our video biography business. And what better way to celebrate a birthday than with images that form part of our national heritage?

This one is called "Ears that hear not". It was taken around 1914 in the Appalachians. There is a vast visual treasure in our national museums and collections. And with the magic of modern technology, we can view items - from repositories like the Library of Congress - in the comfort and convenience of our homes.

Here is another favorite image of mine. It's a picture of Joseph Schollick, an osteologist at the National Museum in Washington - taken in 1923. (I think we have moved beyond the wholesale exploitation of nature that, sadly, marked previous centuries.) The LOC make images like these available in a number of sizes, including (for some images) uncompressed "tif" files up to 50MB!

And Yosemite, "Overlooking nature's grandest scenery", as the picture title has it. Dating from 1901, the original image was a stereograph, designed to be used with a stereograph viewer for a 3D effect.
It's fairly common for us to use these or other archive images in our personal history projects. Since many of these images are now part of the public domain, they can be used without restriction in video documentary projects.

And my Mom's favorite: "Farm children playing on a homemade merry-go-around, Williams County, North Dakota." It was taken by Russell Lee in 1937 as part of the Farm Security Administration's national photographic project. (Grandparents can show it when the grandkids ask, "What did you do before computer games?".)

If you are interested in viewing more images from the wonderful collection at the Library of Congress, start here: LOC Images

Interested in tips on incorporating images in a video biography project? Recording memoirs on video is an increasingly popular method for preserving personal and family history. And nothing enhances a video memoir more than well placed and well timed photographs. Video Memoirs: Best Ways to Include Photos.

Orange County's forgotten history Wild times on San Juan Creek

2009-10-10T10:03:00.000-07:00

Most of us traveling the Ortega Highway these days drive pell-mell just to get across the Santa Ana Mountains and onto the 15 Freeway. We barely notice the creek or the valleys along the way. Or the history.

Not so for Doc Wylde.

Doc Wylde is an impassioned naturalist. Not the airy-fairy tree-hugging kind, but someone who has hunted and fished and camped nature all his life. Now 82 and living in San Clemente, he remembers as a child traveling along Highway 74 in his father’s Model A Ford to get to the family cabin 13 miles from Capistrano on the San Juan Creek.

As a youngster he hoisted trout out of San Juan’s pools by hand, moving them from smaller to larger pools so they would survive the summer dry spell. He collected wild honey from the hills, being careful to avoid the mountain lions that lived in the clefts of Sitton Peak. Later, he would give Elynor his Sigma Chi Fraternity pin during a USC pledge party at the cabin (properly chaperoned of course.)

Some of Doc Wylde’s best memories come from San Juan Creek.

Like how he and his buddies (and their girl friends) used to sneak into the thermal pools along the 74. The pools were part of the old San Juan Hot Springs Resort, long ago boarded up, but still making a hot water stream along the 74.

Or the time Doc went shooting quail along the 74 with his shotgun. Not hitting any birds, he volunteered to use his posterior as a test target. (“I was wearing jeans,” he protests, to avoid being thought too bone-headed.) Sure enough, the problem was not the gun, and Doc was pulling shotgun pellets out of his bottom for weeks.

An even less pleasant memory of San Juan Creek comes from the war years (WWII). Doc let friends talk him into breaking into cabins along the creek. They got in, got out, and Doc became very popular giving the loot away at school. Then the sheriff arrived at school. Doc spent two weeks in the Orange County lock-up. “It sure taught me a lesson,” he says today. “I never broke the law ever again.”

As well as a naturalist, Doc is a historian. Not the pipe-smoking, tweed jacket wearing kind, but someone who all his life has photographed, filmed, processed and preserved his own history and that of his family. He has created an archive of more than 10,000 images and over 50 hours of film and video footage (including rare 8mm color footage of a fishing trip to Mexico using home made scuba equipment).

Doc the Naturalist and Doc the Historian is an Orange County Original.

Doc is also part of a growing number of Orange County seniors who are preserving their life stories with private, personal history documentaries. (The choice these days is much wider than ever before: Personal History Biography: Audio, Video or Written Memoir?.) Doc created his video biography so that future generations would know his story. "I want them to know something about me and our family history. This video biography is something that I can leave them."

It is increasingly common. There is an enormous interest out there among the baby boomers who see that their parents have lived so much history. According to the Association of Personal Historians, an organization representing personal historians and video biographers from across the United States, membership of the Association has climbed to over 600 from less than 50 only a decade ago.

To see an excerpt of Doc Wylde’s Video Biography, including some of that astonishing home-made scuba footage, follow this link: Wylde Ride

Our own Ken Burns moments

2009-09-26T08:49:00.000-07:00

I am a big Ken Burns fan. Ken Burns makes PBS-aired documentaries on big subjects - baseball, jazz, the civil war, WWII. And starting Sunday September 27, 2009 - there will be "National Parks". While Ken Burns' lens may focus on the larger themes in this country's experience, he leisurely and lovingly builds up his stories from small, personal experiences. Experiences such as those our parents and grandparents might have had.

Interviewed about his new documentary: "The National Parks - America's Best Idea", Ken Burns explained why biography is so important to history:

It has become the fashion that biography is dismissed as hagiography or hero worship and we turn to other forces for explanations – economic, political, social forces that affect events, and they certainly do. But it is so interesting to see, particularly in our history, that individuals do matter, that people can come across something and be a catalyst for change.

Ken Burns is still that curious, quiet kid who discovers an old shoe box of black and white photographs in his grandparents' attic and who holds them, and stares at them, until he has almost willed himself inside the picture. And look! Over there in a box is a bundle of old letters tied with string. Hard to make out the writing ... but what do they say? Wait, are those 8 mm film rolls? I wonder if there's a projector around here...

And so his documentaries unfold using personal history and the artifacts of passed lives to recreate an earlier time and experience. They show that the places and events that our grandparents knew as personal were actually part of a broad current and shared experience.

In the video biographies we make, visits to National Parks often feature as important, formative experiences. In a project we delivered just today, Roger Peck first visited Yellowstone National Park as a child in 1934 (that's him with the bear). In 1949 he returned with his wife-to-be (properly chaperoned of course) and posed in front of that deer antler house (see below). In 1961, he went back again with his own two children. Roger learned to became a naturalist from his parents by visiting wild areas like Yellowstone. And he taught his own children about the wild at that same park years later. And now, at the age of 82, he has preserved his past - including his images and his memories of national parks - in a video biography

Ken Burns inspires us all to preserve our own family history. As accomplished and as polished as his films are, he pulls them together from the simplest of ingredients: photographs, letters, memoirs, interviews, contemporary video of places - all things available to us all. He shows us the ease and simplicity of preserving family history by blending these elements together into a compelling and important story. And he makes us realize that our own unique experiences - aggregated together - constitute the broad flow of history and culture in this great land.

"National Parks" has more contemporary footage than most of his recent documentaries. If the preview material is any guide, it will be a feast for the eye and the emotions. Watch video clips from the documentary. And it should be a prompt for us to go looking through those attics!

You can all kinds of surprises in old cupboards: Family History in Grandma's Wardrobe.

It's not about the toys

2009-09-08T14:42:00.000-07:00

I was reading a blog today by Russell Bishop on Huffington Post. He nicely put into words what family history and video biography mean to me:

Distinguish... between material world success (things) and the deeper, more meaningful levels (enriching experiences)... (M)ost of us would prefer inner peace, grace, loving, expansion and caring over material world possessions.

Of course, we all need a basic level of things before we can enjoy those enriching experiences. Most of us remember Mazlow's "hierarchy of needs", his famous 5-level pyramid setting out the foundations for a successful life: physiological needs, safety, love/belonging, esteem then self-actualization. We never get to the higher order needs (like esteem) unless we satisfy the lower order needs (like eating and shelter). Obviously food and shelter are essential things - but some people elevate the drive for things to a competition, i.e. "Who dies with the most toys wins".

I have interviewed hundreds of people in the course of my Your Story Here Video Biography business. Usually, the subjects are over 60 years of age; many are well over 60. The interviews sometimes take 4 or 5 hours. One thing that people almost never mention is the things - the stuff they have acquired along the way.

People remember kindnesses, their parents, fears, challenges attempted and challenges met, friends and siblings, the birth of children. They remember mistakes and they remember successes. They remember falling in love. They remember the name of their first grade teacher more often than you would credit! And though almost everyone wants to talk about their first job and how much they got paid; almost no-one wants to talk about their last job.

No one - so far - has come to the interview with a list of assets or even an outline of their material successes. When the time comes to reflect, I believe the subject knows in their heart what the next generation will truly care about. As Ellen Goodman once wrote:

"What the next generation will value is not what we owned but the evidence of who we were and the tales of how we loved."

Creating a video biography or personal history documentary is a chance to reflect on what one has seen and done and what one has achieved so far. It allows the subject to talk about those who have already passed. It is an opportunity to pass on personal philosophies and hard-won wisdom. It is a gift and a duty to the generations that follow (even if the subject is reluctant) and it is the best chance we have of achieving a kind of immortality.

It's not about the toys.

10 things (apart from photos) to include in a video memorial

2009-08-15T08:02:00.000-07:00

When a loved one passes, many people decide to create a video memorial to honor and remember them. (I have written about my first video memorial in an earlier blog: January 2009.) Time is usually short, and often the best that can be done is to gather the available photos and have them put into an automatically generated slideshow using programs such as iMovie or even Powerpoint.

Special care should be taken in preparing the montage images and I have given hints about that previously: Fixing photographs.

I like to help people create truly memorable tributes to their loved ones which will be treasured for years to come. Today I am going to help you go beyond the simple image sequence.

Your Story Here has created a number of video memorials recently (and sadly). And the basis for each one is normally a series of personal pictures. But what else can you include apart from photographs? Well, the idea is to gather as much and as varied material as possible that helps convey and preserve the uniqueness of the subject.

Stories: A passing is often the occasion for families to reunite - sons and daughters fly in (sometimes from interstate or even overseas) and people's thoughts turn to the happy memories. Some people will be writing and presenting eulogies. We try to take advantage of these impromptu reunions and capture short recollections of the subject from family and friends; often informally before the event. Where we can't record the person directly, we record via webcam or just record audio over the telephone (Skype can help with this) and have it played over an image of the person telling the story.

Captions: You may know the time, place, people and occasion of the photos. If you do, include that as a caption. And always look on the back! There is often a description; and if it's in the person's handwriting, then make sure you scan that and have it included (possibly with a split screen).

Old video footage: In most cases there is video footage of the subject somewhere in the family. You just have to ask! Nothing brings a person back into our memories better than film - ideally with audio also.

Cards and letters: Grandparents - especially - accumulate cards and artwork from their grandchildren. I have never met a grandparent who has thrown away a single picture or letter from a grandchild! These can also be included in the video memorial to show how loved and honored the person was in life.

Poems and sayings: Death, for all its pain, is a prompt to ponder the big issues in life. And a collection of sentiments that the person lived by or that represent their beliefs and philosophies helps us to focus our thoughts. Sometimes a person was known for their sayings or homilies. These can be included as simple text screens or as text "crawls".

Voiceover: One member of the family is often designated to present an overview of the person's life at the service. That same person is often well placed to supply narration or voice over for the visual elements of the video memorial. Sometimes it's enough for the person to review the images and other visual material then say a few words about some of them.

Clippings and memorabilia: Some people have been featured in newspapers or magazines or have kept scrapbooks of high school or college athletic or arts achievements. Some people have trophies and awards, or collections.

Handwriting: I always try to include samples of the subject's handwriting. It may be from a photo description, an old (possibly last) shopping list, or it may be a letter written a long time ago or even recently. It may be a signature from a driver's license or passport.

A DVD box cover: Having put together a stunning video memorial, you should have it packaged so that it is immediately identifiable and records the significant milestones of the person's life. You can also include maps. Family and friends will likely want a copy to keep so it's worth making the project recognizable.

A web posting: Actually, this is the 11th thing. But with the vast choice of free online web hosting available, many people opt to post their video memorial so that it is available at any time and from any computer for any friend or family member.

This is a lot to think about, especially if time is short. But after a while, perhaps with the anniversary of a passing coming up, folks sometimes revisit the subject of the video memorial. With the additional time and thought, a fitting video tribute can be created with photos, and other important artifacts of the life.

Death is life's greatest challenge. But it is only in death that we come to appreciate the true gift and miracle of a life. We encourage people to use the burst of emotion and energy that accompanies these occasions to create a fitting tribute to their loved ones. Make your video memorial truly memorable.

And here you can read about My First Memorial Video.

Copy it right: Video Copyright

2009-08-01T16:35:00.000-07:00

What I really love about video documentary is the freedom to integrate footage, sounds, images and words from diverse sources into powerful, emotional, multi-media extravaganzas. But there's a danger lurking here: US Copyright laws. Just because you find it on the web (or the TV, or your CD drawer) doesn't mean you can use it. So, what can you use?

Well, I am no expert, but according to my internet resources, here are some things which might be available:

Video you shoot: In general, you own the copyright in the footage you shoot. The main exception is a "work for hire": if you shot the video as an employee or if you shot it for another producer as part of a larger project then you probably don't have the copyright. There are a couple of other minor exceptions: US Copyright guidelines.

US Government footage: The federal government is not entitled to copyright protection. Generally speaking, works created by the US government that have been made public are free of copyright restrictions. This category includes a vast archive of historical images and film footage (especially war-related): Issues affecting the US government.

Material in the public domain: Pretty much anything on which copyright has run out can be used in your video biography. The trick is knowing when that has happened. The general rule is that copyright lasts for the life of the author - plus 70 years. For corporate works (e.g. a Disney cartoon) the term is 95 years from first creation. Works created prior to 1923 (e.g. early Charlie Chaplin films) are now in the public domain: UNC Table.

Short clips that help explain: Copyright law allows "fair use" of a work even though copyright is owned by someone else. This area is a bit murky, but using copyright material in a documentary in a historical sequence or to illustrate an argument or point may well qualify as "fair use". Among other factors, it would be important that the source was attributed, that the extract lasted no longer than strictly necessary, that more than one source was used, and that a license couldn't be obtained or its terms would be excessive for the project: Best practices in fair use.

Works with the author's permission: This is obvious, but if you really want to use some piece in your video - it never hurts to ask. If the piece is non/low-profit and not destined for broadcast, the copyright owner may just say yes. Especially regards music, new bands (look on MySpace) are often keen to have their music featured (and credited) in a film for no charge. If you are lucky enough to get the permission, get it in writing.

Other laws, other factors: What about the situation where you shoot some video to which you own the copyright, but the subject refuses to give permission to use it, or changes their mind? It is never a good idea to go against the wishes of the subject - it is bad business (if you are in business) and with all the laws floating around out there, it is potentially very time consuming. For example, in most states you can be sued for "publication of private facts": Citizen Media Law Project. While there seems to be a high threshold for this kind of suit, it is always best to get the subject's consent for publication - up front and in writing.

Disclaimer: This is just a short summary based on some internet research I did recently. No one should rely on this material in making decisions that could affect their legal rights. If you have any questions involving copyright, consult your attorney!

And good luck with your video biography project!

Video memoir: Our 95 year old Pollyanna

2009-07-18T13:56:00.000-07:00

I love receiving letters - especially the old fashioned kind.

Recently, we created a video memoir for Hazel G. She was a delight. Kind, lively, sharp, matter-of-fact, and a total optimist.

So we open the documentary of her life with something she said during the interview. She had said that she was like Pollyanna - in the famous 1913 story. She always believed in looking for the best in a situation - something to be glad about.

In our work we try to discover a defining character- istic of the subject - not to limit them but to alert the audience to a unifying theme in a life. In Hazel's case, she was definitely a "glass half full" kind of person.

Hazel had a store of priceless old family photos, many from her family's early days in the San Joaquin Valley. But some were not in the greatest condition. We spent hours restoring them to their former glory: (See my blog on restoring photographs).

Hazel's grandson Alan wrote me a nice note after we had finished the project:

My grandmother, Hazel, is 95 years old and going strong. We came to realize that she is the only keeper of much of our family history, and the only one who can identify many of the people in our family photos. So we engaged Your Story Here to document her life. I thought I knew my grandmother quite well, but Your Story Here's detailed and thoughtful process brought out the story of her life in a way I hadn't imagined, and which will be a family treasure forever.

I would interject here to say that while I strongly prefer video memoirs, there are lots of different ways to go: Personal History Biography: Audio, Video or Written Memoir?

Through a process of pre-interviewing me and Hazel, and of going through over 100 family photos, Jane was able to build a basic outline of Hazel's life to guide her through the actual video interview. Because she was so well prepared, she was able to ask the right questions throughout the taping to bring out layers and textures from Hazel's life story instead of just a telling of events.

As for our family photographs, Your Story Here not only scanned them all in and edited them into the video at all the right points, but they also used technology to clean up the cracks and discolorations so the pictures actually look better in the video than when you look at them directly. In addition, they added historical photographs depicting events Hazel was describing but of which we have no pictures of our own. For example, Hazel described the tent city her parents lived in after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and as she describes it we see on screen pictures of an actual tent city from that event.

It is certainly true that family history memoirs have changed over the years - it has only been in the last three to five years that there has even been a "video memoir" option available to people.

Jane was even able to record Hazel's answering machine message, which she hasn't changed in 20 years, and include it playing over the closing credits. A great touch!

The final product flows very smoothly from Hazel's earliest memories through her current perspectives on a long life and the world today. It is the story of her life, fit deftly into the context of the times in which she has lived. I can see now that any attempt to do this on my own would have come up woefully short. Your Story Here produce a professional documentary of a quality that an amateur cannot match.

Of course Hazel will pass one day, but our family has such joy in knowing that we have preserved her voice, her smile, and her stories on video. We have them to enjoy and to share with our kids and their kids. That is truly priceless.

The Video Memoir is a great option for recording important stories as Alan was kind enough to attest. But whatever kind of memoir you choose, the most important thing is saving the story. There are a lot of Pollyannas out there but none of them (or us) are getting any younger!

"Book of the movie": DIY personal history publishing

2009-06-27T16:48:00.000-07:00

Increasingly, clients are asking us to create books using the old photographs we have restored and the narration and captions we have used in their video biographies. The end product, a kind of "book of the movie", is usually delivered alongside the personal history documentary which we created. There are now a host of self-publishing options including Blurb, Lulu, iUniverse, Snapfish, Asuka, WeBook, Qoop - and many others. Maybe you have thought of using one of these services, but haven't yet.

What are you waiting for? It's a blast!

I must admit that I have only got as far as Blurb. But over a number of projects they've given me no reason to shop around. You download their free software, select your template, import images and text, move things around a bit and presto! It's a book!! You upload it to Blurb (a very tidy site), select the "private" or "public" option, and order as many soft or hard copies as you need (around $10 paperback - $60 hardcover). Turn around time is between 1 and 2 weeks. You can send links to family and friends who can preview the first 15 pages and order their own copies.

Quality? Actually, very high. Not quite a high-end art book but very nice all the same.

Now, I have heard many people say Lulu is better (it's been around longer). And I have experienced a number of glitches and crashes with Blurb which can be frustrating, as is its slowness (reason: it's always auto-saving so relax, you never lose anything). And Blurb is constantly updating their service (e.g. you can now upload PDFs).

So, if you are curious - and if you have the stamina for what can be a fairly fiddly job - you may well be as pleased as I (and my clients) have been with DIY personal history publishing.

Jane Lehmann-Shafron co-founded Your Story Here Video Biography, a documentary production company that specializes in video biography and family history documentary. Based in Orange County CA, her award-winning films have been featured in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted on 949 742-2755 or through her website.

D-Day, old soldiers & veterans video

2009-06-06T08:07:00.000-07:00

Sandy Ross, who turns 88 in December and lives in Lake Forest, wanted to be a pilot ever since his days as a Lockheed riveter, riding in the cockpits on the assembly line. Before America's involvement in the war, he begged his father to let him go north to Canada to join up. His father refused. He did not have long to wait. Sandy and his brother joined the Army Air Corps and soon both were piloting P-47 Thunderbolts against German forces in Europe.

Proudly wearing his still-fitting brown bomber jacket and officer's cap, Sandy recalled some of his 51 missions over Europe. Asked about the dogfight that earned him the Air Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross as well as a promotion to Second Lieutenant, he said:

"It wasn't heroic. It was exciting. It was fun."

Today - June 6 - is the 65th anniversary of the WWII D-Day landings at Normandy and President Obama is in Europe marking the occasion. With an estimated 1000 WWII veterans passing on each day, it is critical that their children and grandchildren take steps to ensure their stories are recorded.

Laguna Woods resident Jim Peirano, who turns 94 on December 15, fired at Japanese bombers from the deck of his submarine USS Dolphin during the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. He remembers with horror as the Arizona blew up scattering burning oil over the water - burning hundreds.

Soon after, his submarine left Pearl Harbor to carry the war to the Japanese:

"We did not know anything about fighting a war," he said. "We knew how to dive and exercise the submarine. But the rest we had to learn as the war progressed."

Jim was at the battles of Midway and Tarawa and he saw service in the Solomon Islands where he helped save a group of 29 missionary nuns and children. He was in the middle of the "Battle of Japan" as he terms it, his submarine sinking many enemy ships. He stresses that American forces would drop leaflets on civilian populations before bombing runs, warning them to evacuate - a fact he says is often overlooked.

We have recorded lots of veterans' history to video, including Sandy's and Jim's stories. Using personal photographs, National Archives campaign footage, historical images, newspaper reports, memorabilia and personal interviews we help make old soldiers' war experiences come alive for their children and grandchildren. Preserving the experiences of veterans is some of the most important work we do.

Julian Ertz, whose story we also helped preserve, was a WWII navigator - badly injured when his plane crashed in Wales.

Julian, now 90 and a Laguna Woods resident for 4 years, was anxious to fight in the war in Europe and trained as a pilot and a navigator. In December 1943, Julian and his crew took the "southern" route to England, via Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Natal Brazil then across the Atlantic to Dakar, Marrakech and finally Great Britain. The plane was stocked with candy for war-deprived British children the crew expected to meet.

Tragedy struck for Julian and his crew when his B-24 J Liberator - named "Bachelors' Baby" on account of the single status of its crew - crashed on take off in Wales. The plane was loaded with 50 caliber shells. Julian suffered a broken back, but counts himself lucky. He was able to shelter from the exploding bullets behind the plane's engine, which had become detached. Five of his 10 crew, and a sixth man - an unlucky hitch hiker - were killed. Booster, the mascot dog, was also killed in the crash.

He remembers to this day the cries of Sammy Offutt as he burned alive in the wreckage, begging Julian to end his misery with his pistol. Julian was unable to comply - he did not have the gun to hand. He does not know what he would have done had he had it. Julian returned to the US in a full body cast - later studying law and becoming an attorney.

The recent release of "The Pacific" - the Spielberg/Hanks' HBO 10-part veterans video about ordinary soldiers fighting the Japanese in WWII - keeps the spotlight firmly on "The Greatest Generation" - three of whom here who told their stories. But with around a thousand WWII war veterans now dying every day, it also challenges us to ask if we are doing enough to save our own families' old soldiers' stories.

Our World War II veterans lived through some of the most dramatic times of the 20th century. It is important that their stories are captured for their families and future generations. Most of our veterans are in their 80s and 90s and so there is a real urgency to record their stories now.

Video recording personal life history on DVD is an increasingly popular way for people to record their life history in their own words. It is a way for them to leave a lasting legacy and the life story video becomes a priceless treasure for children and grandchildren. Let's all do our best to record the stories of our Second World War and other veterans with a veterans video.

5 best video biography websites

2009-05-30T12:31:00.000-07:00

Here are my favorite websites to watch both private and commercially produced video biographies and personal history documentaries. In a previous blog, I have covered my family research internet favorites. Here, I want to give you some links to the best the web has to offer on biography video.

1. Top Documentary Films
Hosts hundreds of documentaries and dozens of biography documentaries on well known figures such as Hemingway, Leonard Cohen, Bill Clinton and others. It has a very comprehensive "FAQ" page if you have problems viewing the material. Other video categories include art and artists, military and war, and philosophy.

2. Snag Films
Offers a huge range of commercially produced, contemporary documentaries, including the most successful documentary of all time "Hoop Dreams" and "The Times of Harvey Milk". While there is no "biography" category as such, they have feature films under "history", "life and culture", and "music and arts" categories. And within those categories are video biography gems such as 20 Cans of Chunky Beef Soup.

3. PBS Video
It's hard to beat the classics. The new PBS video website is a dream to browse. As well as other PBS programming, it has the best of its "American Experience" episodes available, full-length.

4. Roots Television
You could get lost in these stories for weeks. Roots Television has a massive archive of unique and hosted biography and genealogical video material, much of it "grass roots". The site, which has an excellent associated blog, represents a whole new concept in personal history and genealogy video.

5. Your Story Here Video Biography Channel
OK, forgive me for this one. This is my YouTube video biography channel that showcases a few of my projects from the last few years. Click the link and have a watch - I have become personally attached to all the subjects who, without exception, are very special people. Want a recommendation? Well, they are all my favorites but Beverley's story touched a lot of people.

And if you need help preserving the story of someone close to you with a video biography by all means contact me.

Enjoy!

The life that got away

2009-05-23T10:52:00.000-07:00

In my video biography work, I sometimes think of my grandma. Here's a picture of me and Nana taken just before she died. (It's from a print ad we made but never ran.) I didn't record her story - I was too young, too busy, didn't know how, thought she had more time. All the usual reasons. I feel sad now that I didn't. But I feel glad that I can help people record their Nanas' stories. And a single word can unlock a world.

Most of our work is in video - making detailed personal history documentaries. But we have recorded audio only and made personal history CDs that can be played on the car stereo or added to iPods. (We sometimes format our video biographies for iPods!) The best part is: it's not hard. You can do it yourself. Start today. And don't have my regrets.

Unsure about whether an audio, written or video memoir is right for you? There are pros and cons to each: Personal History Biography: Audio, Video or Written Memoir?

Grandparents visiting over summer? Make a family history video!

2009-05-16T17:42:00.000-07:00

A lot of our work involves documenting the lives of parents when they travel here to see their children and grandchildren. Children often only see their grandparents when they visit over the summer. And, summer is approaching. So, here's an idea: organize the kids to interview grandma and grandpa on video over the break!

It's a project that will keep the kids (and grandparents) busy for days. And at the end of it, not only will be kids have a new appreciation for what the oldsters went through, but you will have a lasting family history video.

First, ask the kids to make a list of the questions they would like to ask. (You could add some of your own: earliest memory, what kinds of things got them into trouble, what did they dream of doing, illnesses and accidents, school experiences, technology and chores, most influential people, happiest times, etc etc.)

Next, have them call or email letting the grandparents know what to expect! They could share with them some of the questions. And suggest they bring over some photos of themselves from the "old days".

Setting up for the interview is easy enough. See Video Biography 101: First things. All you need is a home camcorder, some lapel mics (RadioShack has them cheap) and a tripod.

And make sure you have plenty of spare tapes!

If my experience is any guide, when you play the interviews on TV it will prompt a whole new family history discussion.

Can the kids edit the material? If you have Windows Movie Maker or iMovie on your home computer, then they probably can. They can scan in the photos, add captions and titles, voiceover, you name it. They will probably surprise you how quickly they master the technology.

Don't waste the grandparents next visit: put them and the kids to work on a family history video!

My own kids' grandfather passed away a long time ago now and I never got it together to record his story - something I regret nearly every day! (I have recorded their grandmother - who is still alive.) Every life is worth preserving and his was no exception, as I wrote about recently in an article: Born poor, fought a war, worked hard, died early. Otherwise, it was all good.

Video biography wins film award

2009-04-11T19:30:00.000-07:00

We made a short video biography of Inge Papich this time last year. That film - called "Growing Up Mischling" - has just won Best Short Documentary at the 10th Annual Lake Arrowhead Film Festival. What a marvelous surprise!

Inge is a delightful woman living in Orange County who grew up under Adolph Hitler. Like most children, Inge just wanted to fit in. Born in 1928, her family rented an apartment in downtown Berlin in the 1930s. In the film, we show a photo of all of them, before the war started, in front of a Christmas tree.

Inge learned the Hitler salute, sang the Nationalist songs, and dreamed of joining the Hitler youth. She remembers attending the 1936 Berlin Olympics and getting horribly sun burnt!

The only trouble was: Inge was a "Mischling", a special category under the Nuremberg Race laws for people of both Jewish and non-Jewish ancestry. Sterilization and other measures were at different times advocated for "Mischling", they were banned from certain occupations, and they received less rations of food and other essentials. But they were never a direct target of the dreadful Holocaust.

So even though her Jewish grandmother was taken, and her father and her family suffered discrimination, Inge was lucky.

Inge never made it into the Hitler youth - she was prohibited. After her grandmother was taken away to a concentration camp and her father killed in the German merchant navy, her family's apartment was bombed to pieces by the Allies. So Inge, her mother, her older brother and her baby brother fled south to Czechoslovakia and lived in ditches and barns for the next 2 years.

Finally, the war over, and after a lucky escape from the marauding Russians, Inge got a job helping the occupying US forces. She met and married a GI and emigrated to America.

Inge managed to save a number of photographs from those old days. She talks about them in the film. Here is a short excerpt:

Inge's story and our video documentary of her experiences was written about in the Orange County Register. Most people congratulated Inge for telling her story and for surviving a terrible ordeal. Some commented that she had not suffered as tragically as so many others had and that her story was undeserving of attention.

Inge's story is her story. It's her story about growing up mischling. Everyone has a story and everyone should have the chance to tell it.

Those who lived through the majority of the 20th century - one and all - have some of the most remarkable material for memories that humans have had the luck - or misfortune - to experience.

Postscript: Our short film on Inge Papich also won a 2009 Telly Award. The Telly Awards receive over 13,000 entries annually from the finest ad agencies, production companies, TV stations, cable companies, interactive agencies and corporations in the world. It is a remarkable achievement to be selected for recognition!

The terrible events of WWII seared themselves into millions of memories and, directly and indirectly, affected many more lives. Here is just one more of them: Video Memorial to Dead Nazi Survivor.

It's a Love Story: Letters Home

2009-03-21T10:52:00.000-07:00

It was Spring in the San Fernando Valley. He spied her across the fence of his sister's new house. She was 15 and barely noticed him. He was a 19 year old army private, soon to land on the beaches of Normandy. He came home to LA for one more visit and in 5 days dating had decided she was the one. He asked, through a friend, if he could write to her. She said yes.

He was assigned to a tank destroyer unit. He was at the cutting edge of the 1944 invasion of Europe. His job was to hunt out German tanks. He was so close to the front that a major danger was American artillery. Even under the worst of conditions, he wrote - often by flashlight.

She was still in high school. She wrote back - mostly. Sometimes he would write to her parents (boldly calling them "Mom" and "Dad") - blaming imagined mail delivery problems for a shortage of responses. It was hard to match his output though.

He would write mostly of everyday things, and of his plans for when he finally returned home. He even talked about having children. The mortality rate in his unit was staggering - maybe 1 in 5 would survive.

This is a happy story. He made it home safe and they married. And he got his children: 8 in all. This week I interviewed the couple, still together and obviously still very much in love. She hadn't looked at the letters in all that time. They were still in an old brown box. But now she was reading them again, on camera. Each letter still in its envelope, some letters showing the effects of the censor's scissors, each letter a treasure.

I asked if it was love at first sight. "No, but I know I liked him a lot." But through the letters, she said, she did fall in love with him. With as many adventures that they have had over their long lives, with all the family history we recorded, it is a simple story. It's a love story.

Using letters to tell a story on video is a very effective way to connect subjects to their personal history. They are historical artifacts, they support the story. They prompt fresh memories. And filming a subject reading letters, with close-ups of the script, the hands etc., produces very good, emotional, documentary pictures. The interview material combined with the letters, personal photographs, voice-over, historical footage, captions and text, and music brings a story to life.

I love my job!

Jane Lehmann-Shafron co-founded Your Story Here Video Biography, a documentary production company that specializes in video biography and family history documentary. Based in Orange County CA, her award-winning films have been featured in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted on 949 742-2755 or through her website.

Alzheimer's Memories on Video

2009-03-13T18:19:00.000-07:00

I must admit that when I got a call about creating a video biography for a subject with Alzheimer's Disease, I doubted that anything could be done. After all, the work I do is preserving memories for the following generations. The little I knew about Alzheimers - a terrible disease that destroys memory - made me think that I was being asked to photograph the invisible man (if you know what I mean).

"Oh you'll have to meet my Mom," the client said. "She will forget she even met you before you make it to the front door!" She was a typical client in my business - a daughter who truly adored her mother. I had already heard about her mother's drug regime, the dire prognosis. My concerns were magnifying.

So I met Frances. I already knew that she was born in Louisiana and had moved to LA when she was 20 or so. I found out that she had a lovely, soft southern accent and a lyrical, wistful way of making conversation. But she did seem a little vague and distracted (she kept looking at the History Channel that was playing over my shoulder). We started with photographs - old photographs. I had read that Alzheimer's attacks the short term memory first and I was hoping that the older memories would still be in tact. I held my breath.

By the time we came to set up for the interview a week or so later, Frances was ready. Around 80, beautifully dressed and very proud; a handsome, composed woman. I had been given a number of areas the family wanted covered. She listened carefully to each question, looked quickly at the photographs, and told her stories. As the afternoon wore on, I became more and more astonished. Her memories of her large Italian-American family, of growing up on a strawberry farm and placing pine needles around the plants, of wandering in the local woods, of stealing into the one room school to "sample" pastries, of the love the local people felt for Huey Long, of the separation of her parents - were all detailed and fresh. The room seemed to close in around us as the afternoon wore on and Frances recalled her young life.

I asked Frances about some more recent events and it was obvious that she was totally blank. My final question was about her health (good) and about her memory. "Well, I answered your questions pretty good didn't I?" Yes, she sure did.

I called her biography "Memories".

If you would like more information about keeping memories alive with video why not follow the link or give me a call?

Personal History: Old clothes!

2009-02-20T09:35:00.000-08:00

My husband and I share our interest in genealogy. Reflecting on one of his formative experiences, he writes:

"When my Grandma died, I took on the task of clearing out her house - white stucco, rented - with the blinds always drawn and where she lived for 60 years. It was where she raised her 4 children. Where, in 1942, she had said goodbye to her son going off to war against Japan. It was the house from which she had sent him letters. The same house where the last of those letters had been returned, unopened. The same house that much later as a small boy I visited with my Mom; the house that had dwarfed me, scared me even.

"Some rooms in the house, like my Grandma's bedroom, were always off limits. Dark and off-limits. She had been a strong woman, a strict woman. And now? Here I was inside her sanctum sanctorum. It was like being inside a museum after hours. I was opening drawers, rummaging through cupboards. It felt illicit."

Interest in the past and the stories it throws up is one of America's fastest growing pastimes: "How Popular is Genealogy" . For most us, we arrive on the scene much too late. My husband was too late to interview his grandma about her life, but just being back in her house was a powerful spur to memory.

He continues:

"I didn't know much about my uncle. Only that he had been the oldest and only boy - the star of the family, good on the piano, a better swimmer, with a quick sense of humor and always first in his class. He had gone off to war with all the hope and bravado of that entire generation. I have a photo of him leaning out of a rail carriage looking directly and impishly at the camera. He was christened Edward Augustus (now the names of my two oldest sons) - but they called him "Bill".

"There was one old cupboard in her bedroom, a free standing "gentleman's wardrobe". It had been the most expensive piece of furniture that my grandparents had owned. They had bought it on lay-away when they were first married and my grandpa was starting out as a government accountant.

"When news came that Bill had been killed in action, my Grandma became unhinged. She started to do strange things, like mowing the lawn at 3:00 am in the morning. My Mom couldn't understand why she couldn't find solace in the children who were left, like her. She returned to normal, slowly.

"It had been nearly 50 years since his death as I stood in front of the closet. I peered inside, just like Grandma would have done every single day. I could see a rack of my Grandma's dresses, I remembered the patterns. I also saw a suit. Not a suit really - the fabric was stiff and rough. I brought it out into the light."

A lot of the work we do as genealogists is centered on records and documents. It is rare, but for me the "holy grail" of genealogy, when we discover the human story behind the bare facts. Often, that story emerges slowly and can be pieced together only by inference. It is this quest that lies at the heart of our passion for genealogy video.

My husband concludes:

"It was a military uniform. Bill's old army uniform, with his lieutenants' bars still attached. I felt in the pockets: a watch, a compass, some papers. I held it up. He must have been shorter than me. And much thinner. It felt like I was seeing him for the first time, meeting him, reaching across the decades, almost touching him.

"Grandma had kept Bill's uniform for all those years. Right next to her own clothes. In plain sight - only to her. I wondered what grief and pain - and memories - she felt every single day when looked into that closet."

In our work as video biographers, we like to bring personal items into the story - clothes (or tools, or art, or whatever else is meaningful). They are all part of our personal history. And the personal history of our loved ones.

Personal history biography gives you the chance to capture the important stories in your family. Older folks in particular among us have lived though the most dramatic of all centuries. The 20th Century saw more crisis and tragedy than any in previous history. Follow this link to an article I wrote recently on Personal History Biography.

Genealogy: Showcasing the results

2009-02-09T15:35:00.000-08:00

You have birth, death and marriage records. You know the name of the ship, you have the passenger records. You probably have maps, photos, naturalization certificates, passport applications, social security applications, WWII draft registration cards; recipes even. You have created the family tree. Maybe you have shots of old gravestones; maybe you have photos or even video of towns from the "old country".

You are up to your neck in genealogical information. What now? In this blog, I am going to share some ideas about how to showcase the results of your research - and I am going to show you an example of the fantastic results that can be achieved!

I recently worked with an Italian-American family in presenting the results of all their genealogical research on video - a genealogy video. The grandparents had all come from Italy around the turn of the century. The family had some great documentary material. But by itself, that can be a bit dry. I really wanted to make the story come alive, especially for the grandkids.

Then it hit me. We are all carriers of our culture, we all have our ancestors inside us in one way or another. In the case of the Giacchino's, there was a long tradition of cooking (they are Italian after all).

We decided to film Mom and Dad making home made pasta while talking about their recollections of growing up and their memories of their grandparents. The Dad tells how the recipes have been handed down, but also changed. His son makes pasta, but just a little different to him (the son uses pre-packaged garlic, to Dad's horror!).

We then cut in the interview material (formal interviews of the Mom and Dad) and close-ups of the documents just like you might see on CNN. We used photos from a family vacation back to Italy; photos of the old towns and even shots of the old family farm house. Using maps - with red circles - we showed exactly where everyone came from. And we added historical footage of Ellis Island. Here is a little piece of it:

To give it structure the son, who had done most of the research, narrated the story. I wanted to call the story "Names that End in Vowels" (they all did!). But Mom and Dad felt that wasn't the best title (maybe it was stereotyping) so we settled on "Here, Looking Back". We put a copy of the family tree on the back of the DVD box.

For a lot of us, a book about the family is the right answer. It's a great answer too. As long as books have been around, we still can't improve on the technology - all those pages right there in your hands, it needs no power and you can carry it around.

But how do you really make all that genealogical work really come alive? We have seen one way already. A Powerpoint presentation is another way and it works very well - you can get in close on the documents and add commentary and music. Although, not every computer plays it and you can't watch it on TV.

A website is another great, creative way to present your work. And if you don't want to create your own, you can usually find one that fits. If you choose to blog, the whole thing is really easy to update yourself. I am going to give you some advice about websites in a future blog - watch out for it!

Postscript
Ready for another example of genealogy showcased through video?

Here is the opening sequence from Susan P.'s genealogy video where she talks about the family history tradition in her family - which has been alive in her family for generations.

Read articles about genealogy and genealogy video:
Genealogy Video: Turning Pix into Flix
Genealogy Research: Courthouse Secrets
Genealogy Video - Just One Word Can Unlock a World

Video biography: the reluctant subject

2009-02-07T14:51:00.000-08:00

What do you do when the subject doesn't want you to record their story? I come across this more than you might think. One common reason is vanity: "I don't look so good any more..." Another is lack of vanity: "I haven't done anything amazing!" Sometimes the subject is ill (even dying) and just doesn't seem to have the energy or interest. Or they're too busy. Here's what I tell people:

"Recording personal history is not a vanity project. You don't do it for yourself. You do it for future generations, so that they can get to know you - as well as your parents and grandparents."

I ask them: "What would you have given for a chance to get to know one of your grandparents or great grandparents first hand? To hear them talking about their life, childhood, school days, how they met their spouse and what values or experience they would like to pass down to you. How precious would that be? You can't put a price on something like that."

I then think of my husband. His big regret is that he didn't get to know his grandfather Ned. Everyone said he had a marvelous Irish sense of humor. But that never comes through in photographs. He imagines having a film of Ned talking - and joking. Video cameras and editing suites weren't around when Ned died - but they are now.

I also ask reluctant subjects to think of their grandchildren. With families sometimes living so far apart, grandchildren often don't get to really know their grandparents. "Don't you want your grandchildren to know their history, to know about your parents - and their challenges, and successes? Don't they deserve to know your story?"

Sometimes I wax lyrical: "We have all held the hand that held the hand that goes back through the generations who saw the industrial revolution, the middle ages, the rise of Christianity, the genius of the Greeks. Palm to palm, fingers squeezing fingers: we are links in a marvelous human chain. Recording stories honors your part in that linkage, and keeps it alive for those who will come after."

Finally: "You know, when your are gone, the thing that your family will value most is not the estate you leave behind. It will be you - memories of you. Who you were, how you thought, who you loved. It will be the chance to re-establish a connection with you - every time they hear your story. It's a kind of immortality. It's a kind of magic."

The distressed (or even dying) subject? My experience has been that subjects can be energized by the chance to tell their story. Ann King was a lovely woman with a loving family who was very ill. When we started, she seemed very small, very quiet, and very gray. As the morning wore on, she grew stronger and more animated. She did a great job recounting the details of her long and interesting life which we quickly edited into a video biography along with her photos and old home movies. I cried when her daughter phoned me just 6 days later to say that Anne had passed away. Her daughter told me that Anne had enjoyed the day immensely.

A video biography captures the stories and the subject's laugh, the way they use their hands when they talk, their smile, their accent, their kindness, their acuity, their pride, their pain, and their tears: Their humanity. Can there be a more important legacy than that?

So if your loved one is reluctant to share their story, ask them again. You won't be disappointed.

Memorial video: Fixing photographs

2009-01-31T12:50:00.000-08:00

Nothing makes a memorial video or a personal history project come alive better than photographs. In this blog I am going to tell you how to scan them and how to fix them so they'll sparkle in your work.

First, a warning. Never, ever take photos out of their albums. Albums do more than keep them protected. They provide contextual information. If you are having trouble dating a particular image, the chances are that the nearby images were pasted in at around the same time - so you can look for clues there. Also, grandma sometimes wrote captions on the pages and that information will be lost forever once the image goes.

Scanning. It can be confusing. All those settings. High resolution sounds good but it's slow and takes up disk space. Low resolution is quick, the files are lean and emailable, and the result looks good enough on the screen. Right? Well, maybe. Here are the rules you should follow:

If you are ever going to print the images, even maybe, then set the scanner at a minimum 300 dpi (dots per inch). 300 dpi is a good resolution for printing. For smaller photos, use 400 or even 600 dpi. For slides and negatives, use a minimum of 1200 dpi (I use 2400)

If you are only want to use the image on screens and in emails, iPods, phones etc, scan at 72 dpi. TVs and computers operate at 72 dots per inch (and on them it looks good). But here's the thing. Can you ever rule out printing the image? I doubt it. Given the effort to get the image to the glass, you are better off getting it right first time.

So, always scan at a minimum of 300 dpi. Too large to email? Cut it down later. Files too large to store? Hmm. Have you seen the price of external hard drives lately? They are cheap. (Last time I checked you could get 500GB for just over $100.)

And clean the scanner glass first, then blow the dust off the glass and then the image with a can of "Dust Off". This is especially important for slides and negatives. Itsy bitsy dust is all but invisible - but once you see the image in close-up, that dust mote will look like a boulder!

What about that "descreening" button? Only use it for newspaper, magazine or book images (halftones) or images printed on textured paper. Color restoration? Backlight correction? Sharpening? Experiment. (Although I prefer not to check any of those boxes and instead use my photo editing software.)

Alright. You have a scanned image. You open it up on your computer. Chances are it looks ...OK. Do you need to learn Photoshop to fix it? No. There are five main fixes that you can make on almost any came-with-the-computer program (like Microsoft Office Picture Manager) or simple programs like Google's Picasa. If you are careful, you can make the scanned image look better than the original!

Here are my five steps to fix photos: 1. Rotate (by degrees): Straighten those crooked horizons. 2. Crop. Cut out all that unnecessary sky or that garbage can or other useless background (or the white of the scanner lid). Let's get up close with the action. 3. Adjust color tone: maybe the image looks too washed out so boost saturation; maybe there's an unwelcome color tint - so adjust "hue". Then: 4. Correct for red eye (pets included).

Now here comes the most important one: 5. Fix contrast. The reason that a lot of images look terrible is that they don't have a full tonal range - they look "flat" or muddy. Once you boost the contrast so the blacks are black (not dark grey) and the whites are white (and not milky) - the image will really "pop". Play around with the "auto correct" or "I feel lucky" buttons to get the contrast working for you.

And always save the result under a different file name. You will want to keep your original scanned copies in case you change your mind later about your improvements.

Learn more about advanced retouching and restoration of old photographs: Retouching Digital Photographs

Video Biography 101: Scrapbooking gone wild!

2009-01-24T09:24:00.000-08:00

What to include? Well, video of course. That's normally an interview (see my blog: First things). But what else? The exciting thing about video biography is that you can include almost anything, and you must. A good video biography is just a rich, wonderful, sprawling collage - it's scrapbooking gone wild!

OK. Music, of course. The first video on the lower left of this page shows the beginning of Julian Ertz's video biography. We show him listening to an old audio recording of him singing with his (now passed) wife Paula. It's still hard for me to look at it without tearing up... And audio. I am constantly surprised and delighted to find how often someone in the family has recorded stories on old tape.

And objects. A favorite doll maybe, a Phi Beta Kappa pin. When we interviewed Marvin Yarin for a video biography he showed the pliers he used in WWII to string communication wire, he also had his old army jacket and a pretty good collection of German army paraphernalia like the Mothers' Cross and old books.

Personal photos of course, old and new. But don't limit yourself to what the person has - go look for more! One of my clients was raised in Iowa and talked longingly about the State Fairs in the 1930s. A quick Google and we had a whole set of vintage Iowa State Fair postcards. First movie? I bet you can find the original movie poster. Favorite radio actor? You'll find them. (And don't forget to look at the back of those personal photos - you just might find grandma's 16 years old hand telling you who's in the shot.)

Maps are another great addition. Another client (a couple) talked about their parents growing up in South Philly. We found a 1942 land use map (Google maps) that showed the city around that time (it even showed the next door coal yard that Dad's family used to "borrow" coal from in the freezing winters!).

Don't ignore documents: letters, report cards, newspaper clippings, wedding invitations, passports, ship passenger manifests, birth/death/marriage certificates, diplomas, programs from plays. Can you think of some others? We love to pan across old documents in our video biographies (in a marriage document we gently showed the groom's signature - a simple "X"; passenger manifests will tell you how much money the person had on arrival - almost always an vanishingly small sum).

And activities. If you are filming your Mom or Dad, or Grandma or Grandma, get them moving around! Look again at the videos on the left. See the third one down? That's Chuck, he was 88 then (89 at time of writing). We filmed him driving himself to work!

And, and, and... The possibilities are limitless. Technology has delivered to all of us the chance (the duty?) to immortalize our loved ones, to connect grandparents not just with grandchildren but with their grandchildren. Let's get busy!

Family Research: One word unlocks a world

2009-01-21T08:36:00.000-08:00

When it comes to family history, a single word can make a world of difference. One word! One single word can be like a compass direction, or the combination to a safe. A word can start a journey, unlock a world.

* Grandmother's maiden name? That's going to help track down a whole branch of ancestors. Fortunato. An Italian second name. What else? Well, as one of my clients found out, the word means lucky. He discovered it was very common for the clergy to give foundlings under their care that name. (Most abandoned babies weren't left with the name of the mother attached!) A major discovery.

* What about cause of death? With all the advances in genetic medical research, what grandma or grandpa died from could make an important difference to someone's medical treatment. Or it could link them to time and place - influenza in 1919? Industrial accident? A recent client who grew up in the Dust Bowl recalled on film that his oldest brother died as a boy during the Great Depression - of dust inhalation.

* Favorite song? Tells you about a person's taste, locates them in the popular culture of the time, makes them real. Let's you find it and listen to it on iTunes! Another of my recent clients loved the song More Than You Know. We filmed her singing it in karaoke and named her video biography that - which really fit.

* Village where great grandpa grew up? Connects grandpa to a place, with customs and traditions, with a history, with distant relatives. With a little stone bridge over a river maybe. Birth, marriage records.

* Number of children? Children mean cousins. Cousins are your best friends when it comes to family history. If you are wondering where all grandma's photos went, chances are they are now with one of the cousins (the son or daughter who handled the estate - or their kids - would be my bet).

* Name of ship? Ships have records, passenger lists, ports of embarkation and destination - even personal information. From ship lists you can find out if your ancestors were literate, what village they came from, how much money they had in their pocket on embarkation, who they were staying with then they arrived, who they traveled with.

* Battalion? Trust the army to have recorded everything and to have it all stashed somewhere. You will be amazed at how much information the services collected.

For those of us who feel we are too busy to get started, getting one word shouldn't take too long. You can get it with a phone call ...if you don't wait too long!

And here is an example of family tree research in action:

If you are planning on taking your family research to the court house (Genealogy Research: Courthouse Secrets) a single word may be enough to point you in a direction that will lead on to all kinds of fascinating discoveries.

Happy hunting!

Memorial Video Case Study

2009-01-19T12:25:00.000-08:00

The first memorial video I ever made was about my Dad. He had grown up poor in South Australia, the descendant of immigrants who had fled chaos in mid-19th century Germany. They escaped war and poverty in Silesia for peace and poverty in Australia! He became a navigator in the Pacific war against the Japanese and was later stationed in Japan for the Allied Occupation. He was an amateur boxer and rugby player. In civilian life, he built his own house and worked with early computers. He loved my mother more than anything. I wanted my children to know their grandfather.

My twin boys were only one when he passed away from liver cancer at 74. So we couldn't interview him. Instead, we filmed me talking about the history of our family and about Dad. We interspersed photographs of Dad as a boy (not many of them!) that we panned across and showed in close-up. (We had to fix them up a bit first in Photoshop.) It was like a very sophisticated photo montage.

I had quite a few good air force photos and several documents. We added captions showing the time, place and who the people were - I had to ask Mom for help on that. (Don't men and women in the service always have nice photos? I guess the risk of dying prompts them to take the trouble!)

We added music. We made a DVD with chapters and a menu. We put it in a DVD box with a special cover we designed showing Dad with the handle-bar mustache he had in the Air Force and we put all the major facts in his life on the back. The whole thing was like an A&E biography!

My three boys watched it with great interest and asked lots of questions. My Mom cried when she watched it. She showed it to the other grandchildren. We made copies for all the family. We even posted a piece of it on YouTube so relatives living in other cities could see it.

Some people like to use PowerPoint. Video has many of the advantages of a PowerPoint presentation - but it's more accessible. Everyone can play a DVD but not everyone can get PowerPoint up and running. Also, PowerPoint presentations run on computers but mostly we prefer to watch things in our living rooms. Once made, you just pop it into the machine and it plays. The editing can be tricky - especially if you want a professional look - but anyone with a camera, an editing program, and some perseverance can do it.

Read more about memorial video:
Memorial Videos - Surviving Death has Never Been Easier

Read about the subject of another memorial video: Video Memorial to Dead Nazi Survivor

I have come a long way since that video memorial of my dad and now, many years later, I really know what I am doing! If you need help, by all means stop by my video memorial web page Video Memorials

Family Research: Internet Favorites

2009-01-18T09:45:00.000-08:00

In the course of my work, I do a lot of family history research. The Internet age has certainly transformed this area. Here are some of my favorite family history related websites.

A vast amount of advice, and form documents (like a family tree creator) can be found at the non profit "Family Search" site: http://www.familysearch.org/

So many people or their ancestors passed through Ellis Island. And so much information, like passenger details, ship names and arrival dates can be obtained easily from your desk top computer: http://www.ellisisland.org/

Interested in military records - enlistment information, awards and decorations? Prisoners of war? Japanese civilians interred during WWII? Arrivals in New York during the Irish famine? The US National Archives is a treasure trove of information, much of it on line: www.archives.gov/aad

The US census is taken every decade. You can search census records for each decade from 1790 to 1930 - on line and for free: http://www.ancestry.com/

The Federal government's social security death index can be helpful in tracking down deceased relatives. You can search it for free at Roots Web: http://ssdi.rootsweb.com/

If connecting to the greater human family through long term genetic ancestry is more your thing then DNA testing through the World Family Network may be the answer: http://www.worldfamilies.net/

What about a website especially for genealogists and family history lovers? Roots Television is free internet-based TV with a long program list of "roots" related subjects: http://www.rootstelevision.com

* Vital records? Go to Vital Records: http://www.vitalrec.com/
* Genealogy websites? Cyndi's List has the best collection: http://cyndislist.com/
* Discussion forums? Try: http://genforum.genealogy.com/
* Archive photographs? The Library of Congress has lots of free high resolution historical images: http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html
* Historical footage or audio? TV ads from the 1950s? The Prelinger Archive is the place for free footage: http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger

Happy researching!

Video Biography 101: First things

2009-01-17T12:39:00.000-08:00

So, you want to record a life on film. You can hire someone to help - or you can do it yourself. Let's talk about doing it yourself. It's easy. Really. All you need is a video camera - and the following 5 tips:

First, get a tripod. No one can watch a film that jitters and jumps. Tripods are cheap. Geeky, sure, but cheap. And everyone sells them - Walmart, Target - everybody. And they just screw into the little hole in the bottom of the camera (trust me, it's there). If you are on a super tight budget, just put the camera on a table or on a little pillow or bean bag.

Second: sound. Often hard to hear things you record, right? Your camera has a built in mic., but it's pretty weak. For about $30 you can buy a little Lavaliere, or lapel mic. I know our local Radio Shack sells them. And they plug into the camera and clip on the subject. Beautiful.

OK, I can see you're ready for the advanced class, so let's jump right in.

Third point: position the camera so the subject is just off center - not bang in the middle - that's dorky and amateurish. No, the advanced student needs to follow the "rule of thirds". Place your subject so that a vertical line drawn about a third of the way from the right - or left (doesn't matter) would pass right through them.

Fourth (we're rolling now) - give the subject some noseroom. Have them look toward the center - not the side. They can look at you (asking the questions) or at the camera. Your choice.

Fifth, give them some light. Video cameras are very light sensitive (that's good) so even a living room lamp should do the job.

Finally, do it today. I mean it: TODAY. In my business I often come across folks who were always meaning to get started recording Mom's or Dad's stories. But the usual day to day stuff always got in the way. And then one day it was too late.