July 18, 2026
How to Write a Family History Photo Release or Consent Note
A plain-language family photo consent note for recording one image's permitted uses, credit preferences, boundaries, and review date.
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Resources, guides, and reflections on oral history, Indigenous continuity, and ancestral documentation.
July 17, 2026
How to Write Alt Text for Family History Photos Without Losing the Story
A practical, privacy-aware alt text template for making family photos accessible while protecting living people, source context, and uncertainty.
Read more →July 17, 2026
How to Write Family History Captions That Protect Privacy and Preserve Context
A practical, consent-aware caption template for preserving source context and uncertainty while protecting living people before a family item is shared.
Read more →July 16, 2026
How to Redact Family History Documents Before Sharing Them
A practical, consent-aware guide to creating an honest share copy that protects living people, private knowledge, provenance, and family context.
Read more →July 16, 2026
How to Decide What Family History Materials Can Be Shared Publicly
A practical, consent-aware framework for deciding what family history materials can be public, family-only, permission-required, or closed.
Read more →July 15, 2026
How to Hold a Family Archive Review Meeting That Brings More Stories Forward
A practical, consent-aware guide to holding a family archive review meeting that invites corrections, new stories, boundaries, and a clear next step.
Read more →July 15, 2026
How to Make a Family History Handoff Plan So the Research Can Continue
A practical family history handoff plan for passing on research logs, oral histories, access details, consent boundaries, and next steps without losing the story.
Read more →July 14, 2026
How to Keep a Family History Research Log Without Losing the Story
A practical guide to keeping a family history research log so you can track searches, failed leads, unresolved questions, and next steps without losing the story.
Read more →July 14, 2026
How to Label Family History Sources So Future Relatives Can Trust the File
A practical guide to labeling family history sources with provenance, context, and certainty so future relatives know what is documented, inferred, or still unresolved.
Read more →July 13, 2026
What to Do When Family Memory and Official Records Don't Match
A practical guide to handling conflicts between family memory and official records using evidence labels, oral testimony, uncertainty notes, and careful source comparison.
Read more →July 12, 2026
How to Use a Family Timeline to Plan Your Next Oral History Interview
A practical guide to using a family timeline to plan your next oral history interview so gaps, contradictions, and blank years turn into focused questions.
Read more →July 12, 2026
How to Build a Family Timeline From Photos, Documents, and Oral History
A practical guide to building a family timeline from photos, documents, and oral history so names, moves, and major events fall into sequence without false certainty.
Read more →July 11, 2026
How to Identify People in Old Family Photos Before the Names Are Lost
A practical guide to identifying people in old family photos, asking elders better questions, and recording uncertainty without pretending a guess is a fact.
Read more →July 10, 2026
How to Catalog Family Photos, Documents, and Recordings in One Simple Spreadsheet
A beginner-friendly guide to cataloging family photos, documents, and oral history recordings in one spreadsheet so your archive stays findable and connected.
Read more →July 10, 2026
How to Organize a Family Archive So It Stays Usable
A practical guide to organizing recordings, notes, photos, and documents so a family archive stays findable, understandable, and usable over time.
Read more →July 9, 2026
How to Turn One Family Interview Into a Lasting Archive
A practical guide to turning one recorded family interview into a lasting archive with file structure, naming conventions, captions, backups, and connected photos and documents.
Read more →July 9, 2026
How to Start a Family Oral History Project in One Weekend
A practical one-weekend plan for families who want to document an elder without getting overwhelmed. Start small, record one good interview, and preserve the context around it.
Read more →July 8, 2026
How to Create a Family History Podcast (Or Audio Series)
A family history podcast is the simplest distribution engine for recordings you've already made. Learn how to launch, upload, distribute, and preserve oral history as an audio series people can actually find and play.
Read more →July 7, 2026
How to Use Google Photos or iCloud to Build a Family Archive
Technology lowers the barrier to storage — but a folder of unlabeled photos is not an archive. Learn how to add the structure and metadata that turn a collection into a record.
Read more →July 7, 2026
How to Interview a Survivor of Historical Trauma (Racism, Displacement, Violence)
Historical trauma is a category of witness, not extraction. A guide to documenting survivors of Jim Crow, redlining, displacement, and systemic violence with care and full agency.
Read more →July 6, 2026
How to Interview a Veteran About Their Service
Veterans carry history that belongs to everyone — but most were never taught how to tell it. A practical guide to documenting military service before it's lost.
Read more →July 5, 2026
How to Interview Someone About a Traumatic Experience
Trauma is not a wall between you and the story — it is part of the story. A guide to conducting trauma-informed oral history interviews with the care, preparation, and witnessing the work requires.
Read more →July 5, 2026
How to Build an Oral History Club at Your School or Library
A step-by-step guide for teachers and librarians who want to start a student oral history club — from the first consent form to a semester-end listening event.
Read more →July 5, 2026
How to Write a Family History Book From Your Oral History Recordings
You have the recordings. Now what? A practical, step-by-step guide to turning oral history transcripts, photographs, and documents into a family history book that can be passed down for generations.
Read more →July 4, 2026
What to Do When Your Family Doesn't Want to Talk About the Past
Silence in families that survived trauma isn't failure — it's strategy. A guide for navigating family silence when you want to document oral history but an elder isn't ready, willing, or able to open the door.
Read more →July 4, 2026
How to Document a Neighborhood That No Longer Exists
A neighborhood erased by urban renewal, highway construction, or gentrification still exists — in the people who remember it. A practical guide to documenting places that are gone from the map but not from memory.
Read more →July 4, 2026
How to Organize a Community Oral History Project
A community oral history project is not a bigger version of a family interview. It requires coordination, consent protocols, and one decision made before you collect the first recording: who holds the archive.
Read more →July 3, 2026
How to Interview a Family Member Who Has Memory Loss
Memory loss doesn't erase the story. It changes the kind of interview you do, and the kind of listening you bring. A practical guide for recording elders living with dementia, Alzheimer's, or age-related cognitive change.
Read more →July 3, 2026
How to Conduct an Oral History Interview Over Video Call
Distance is not a reason to delay. A video call interview captures facial expression, gesture, and environment in ways a phone call can't. Here's how to work with the medium's specific limitations — not just hope they don't happen.
Read more →July 3, 2026
How to Use AI Transcription Tools for Oral History (Without Losing What Matters)
AI transcription tools can produce a first draft in minutes — but they fail predictably on dialect, proper nouns, and low-volume elders. Here's how to use them well: use the tool for speed, and use yourself for accuracy.
Read more →July 2, 2026
How to Preserve Oral History Recordings for 100 Years
The format you recorded on today will be obsolete before your grandchildren are born. Long-term preservation is not about buying the right hard drive — it's about building a system that migrates, verifies, and multiplies copies across decades.
Read more →July 2, 2026
How to Record Oral History in a Second Language
When an elder speaks Spanish, Haitian Creole, Gullah, Yoruba, Garifuna, or another language — and you don't fully understand it — you record anyway. A practical guide for bilingual and multilingual families navigating oral history across a language gap.
Read more →July 1, 2026
How to Interview an Elder Who Grew Up in Poverty
Poverty creates specific silences — shame, self-protection, the instinct to present a better story than the one lived. This guide teaches interviewers how to approach those silences with skill, not just sensitivity.
Read more →July 1, 2026
How to Share Your Oral History Archive With the Next Generation
You've recorded the stories. Organized the files. Now the question is: how do you make sure the people who come after you can actually find and use them? A practical, emotionally direct guide to passing down family oral history archives.
Read more →July 1, 2026
How to Store Family Photos and Documents Alongside Your Oral History Recordings
A practical guide to storing family photos, documents, and oral history recordings together — physical and digital — so the stories stay connected across generations.
Read more →June 30, 2026
How to Transcribe an Oral History Interview Without Losing Your Mind
You have the recording. Now you need a usable transcript. A practical, honest guide to transcription tools, AI auto-transcription, formatting standards, and what to do with the document after — for family historians who have never done this before.
Read more →June 30, 2026
How to Record High-Quality Audio on Your Phone for Family Oral History
The phone in your pocket is good enough — if you know how to use it. A practical guide to environment, positioning, app selection, and settings for recording family oral history on a smartphone.
Read more →June 30, 2026
What to Ask an Elder Before It's Too Late: 50 Questions for Family Oral History
You know you should ask. You've been meaning to call. Here are 50 specific, open-ended questions — organized by theme — for anyone sitting across from an elder who has stories they've never been asked to tell.
Read more →June 29, 2026
How to Donate Your Family Oral History to a Historical Society or Tribal Archive
Recorded family stories and want to give them a permanent home? Here's how to donate oral history recordings to historical societies, tribal archives, and HBCU special collections.
Read more →June 29, 2026
Why Black Families Stopped Talking About the Past — And How to Start Again
The silence in Black families around history isn't absence of memory — it's a documented survival strategy. Understanding why elders stopped talking is the first step to starting the conversation again.
Read more →June 28, 2026
What Is an Oral History Archive? (And How to Build One for Your Family)
An oral history archive isn't a museum. It's any organized system that makes your family's stories findable and survivable. Here's how to build one in an afternoon with a Google Drive folder and a naming convention.
Read more →June 27, 2026
How Oral History Fills the Gaps in African American Genealogy
The pre-1870 brick wall isn't a research failure — it's a feature of the archive. Here's how oral history picks up where the paper trail ends, and how to use family stories as legitimate, testable research leads.
Read more →June 27, 2026
How to Find Living Relatives Using Oral History Clues
A family story is not just a story — it's a set of search terms. Names, places, churches, and migration routes in oral history are active leads. Here's how to turn what you already have into a search that finds living relatives.
Read more →June 26, 2026
How to Write a Family History From Your Recordings
You recorded the interviews. Now you don't know how to turn them into something readable. Here's the thing: this isn't really writing — it's assembling. A practical guide to moving from raw audio to a finished family history document.
Read more →June 26, 2026
What to Do With Oral History After You Record It
Most people stop after the recording. That's the wrong stopping point. A file on your phone with no label, no backup, and no transcript is closer to nothing than you think. Here are the 5 steps that turn a raw audio file into something that lasts.
Read more →June 26, 2026
How to Interview an Elder Who Doesn't Want to Talk
The most common reason families never record the stories they meant to isn't forgetting — it's reluctance. Here's how to interview someone who doesn't want to be interviewed, without pressure and without giving up.
Read more →June 25, 2026
The Difference Between Genealogy and Family History (And Why It Matters)
Genealogy gives you the structure — names, dates, documents, the family tree. Family history gives you the story inside it. Most people need both, and most people start with the wrong one.
Read more →June 25, 2026
How to Store and Back Up Family History Files Digitally (Without Losing Everything)
You digitized the photos. You recorded the interviews. You scanned the documents. Now the question is: where does all of it live — and what happens when your hard drive fails? A practical guide to backup strategy for family archives.
Read more →June 25, 2026
How to Preserve Old Family Photos (And Add Context That Won't Be Lost)
Most people think photo preservation is a scanning problem. It's actually a context problem. A perfectly scanned photo of an unknown woman is nearly worthless without the name, the date, and who she was to the family. Here's how to do both.
Read more →June 25, 2026
Oral History for Beginners: Everything You Need to Know
New to oral history? This complete guide covers what it is, why the window for doing it is closing, who does it, what you need to get started, and how to make your recordings documentation-grade. Everything you need in one place.
Read more →June 25, 2026
How to Organize Family History Documents (Before You Lose Them)
You have boxes of old photos, letters, and records you've been meaning to sort through. A practical guide to triage, categorization, digital backup, naming gaps honestly, and building an archive that someone else can actually use.
Read more →June 24, 2026
Oral History Interview Questions for Grandparents (A Complete Question Bank)
"Tell me about your life" gets you two sentences. Specific questions get you an hour. A complete question bank — organized by childhood, family origins, work, and values — for anyone who wants to capture their grandparent's stories before it's too late.
Read more →June 23, 2026
What DNA Tests Can't Tell You (And How Oral History Fills the Gap)
You have your ethnicity estimate and a list of cousin matches — but no names before 1870, no stories, no faces. Here's what oral history gives you that a DNA test never will, and how to use both together.
Read more →June 23, 2026
How to Start a Family Oral History Project When You Don't Know Where to Begin
You don't need to be an archivist. You don't need to do more research first. Five questions, one person, and thirty minutes — here's how to start before you feel ready.
Read more →June 22, 2026
What To Do When You're the Last One Who Knows the Story
When an elder dies and you realize you're the sole carrier of the family's history, the weight can feel paralyzing. Here's how to start documenting — right now, with what you already know.
Read more →June 22, 2026
Documenting Afro-Indigenous Family History: When Your Story Lives at Two Intersections
When your family's history has been erased twice — through tribal records destruction and the erasure of Black ancestry from rolls and census data — standard genealogy tools weren't built for you. A methodology that takes that seriously.
Read more →June 20, 2026
Creating an Oral History for a Church or Community Organization
A practical guide to launching a church oral history project — who to interview, what questions to ask in an institutional setting, how to organize what you collect, and how to share it with your congregation.
Read more →June 16, 2026
What to Do With Old Family Photos and Documents This Juneteenth
Old photos, letters, and documents hold the evidence. Here's how to turn them into a lasting family archive — starting this Juneteenth weekend.
Read more →June 14, 2026
Teaching Juneteenth Through Oral History: A Classroom Framework
A practical oral history lesson plan for Juneteenth — built for K-12 teachers who want students to engage with living memory, family interviews, and a classroom freedom story archive.
Read more →June 8, 2026
A Juneteenth Oral History Project for Your Family
Juneteenth is the right moment to record what your family survived. Here's a simple oral history project — one elder, one recorder, one afternoon — and the questions to ask this weekend.
Read more →June 5, 2026
How to Research Your Afro-Indigenous Ancestry
If you've tried to research Afro-Indigenous ancestry using standard genealogy tools, you already know the feeling: you hit a wall. This guide is for people who are ready to do this research anyway — with honesty about what the records will and won't give you.
Read more →June 7, 2026
Oral History Consent Form: What to Include (+ Free Template Guide)
If you're in the middle of recording an elder's stories — or preparing for your first community oral history interview — the oral history consent form is the document that makes everything that follows ethical, defensible, and lasting.
Read more →June 6, 2026
How to Preserve Your Family History for Future Generations
There is a window — and it is closing. Every family has elders who carry stories that exist nowhere else on earth. Knowing how to preserve family history is, at its heart, about understanding that those stories are the history. Not just the backdrop to it.
Read more →June 5, 2026
How to Document Your Family's Oral History (A Step-by-Step Guide)
Documenting a family elder's stories doesn't require special equipment or training — just intention and a place to start. Here's the full process, from first conversation to long-term preservation.
Read more →June 4, 2026
How to Start an Oral History Archive in Your Community
There is a window. It's open right now. The elders, the longtime residents, the people who remember — they are still here. But every oral history archive that exists today was started because someone decided not to wait.
Read more →June 3, 2026
Teaching Oral History: Curriculum Resources for K-12 Teachers
Every community holds knowledge that never made it into a textbook. Building an oral history curriculum that takes this seriously is one of the most meaningful things a K-12 teacher can do.
Read more →June 2, 2026
50 Oral History Interview Questions for Families Documenting Their Elders
The stories your elders carry are irreplaceable. No census record, no ship manifest, no property deed contains what your grandmother knows about where your family came from — or what your grandfather remembers about the land he grew up on.
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