Passing It On

Birds: They're here, there, everywhere

Birds. Have you seen one lately? Although they’re just about everywhere, most of us take them for granted. They’re literally above our radar.

Here in Iowa, birdwatchers are all ga-ga this week about the recent sightings of two species of birds never before seen in the state – the fork-tailed flycatcher, which is native to South America, and the black-tailed gull, which is normally found in east Asia. I’m a real amateur at this birdwatching stuff, but I’ve counted 33 species in my suburban backyard since I put up some bird feeders four years ago. They’re fun to watch from our dining room table.

Birds enjoy special status in many cultures and you may have interesting bird-related stories in your own personal history. I know that my mother-in-law has used the term “eats like a bird” when referring to thin people and “wise as an owl” is considered a compliment. Remember comedian George Gobel’s tagline: “Well, I’ll be a dirty bird?” Remember “Chickenman?”

I grew up knowing people named Bird, Pigeon and Robbins, used soap named Dove and had a friend that drove a Thunderbird. The thunderbird, by the way, is a mythical creature revered by some Native American tribes. And the headdress worn by Indian chiefs in my childhood history books were festooned with eagle feathers.

The albatross was a bad sign for mariners, but the first robin of spring was considered a good omen by my gardening friends. Ravens have a dark purpose, according to some, but my duck-hunting relatives anticipated these migrating meals-on-wings each fall. Likewise the pheasant.

Lots of friends had caged parakeets when I was a kid. The documentary film “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill” tells the fascinating story of what can happen when a bunch of pets find their way back into the wild. Alfred Hitchcock saw “The Birds” in a more sinister light.

How do birds figure in your family history? Here’s some information on bird folklore and superstitions to jog your memory a bit.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. If you’d like to know more, check out his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of Antoon's Foobar.

"...we took the bonus, bought a yacht and sailed to Tierra del Fuego"

Have you written your holiday newsletter yet? Me neither.

For some reason, annual family holiday newsletters have gotten a bad rap. Some might say it’s for good reason. Many are sappy, poorly written, badly spelled and are nothing more than brag sheets. Even if that’s all true, they’re still excellent sources of information for a family history. I wish I would have saved every one I’ve received over the years.

But holiday newsletters don’t have to be bad, even if you’re not a professional writer. To make your newsletter memorable, keep it simple, to the point and balanced. Make it newsy instead of an endless string of overstated success stories. Your life wasn’t like that, so don’t try to pass it off that way.

Include some tidbits of true family history in your newsletter to broaden its appeal. Why not include a prized family recipe or a photo of a Christmas past? Share a family story that reflects your true values along with your hopes and wishes for the years ahead.

If you want some specific tips on how to create a newsletter that will be cherished, check out Ted Pack’s web site. It’s full of suggestions, including some actual examples submitted by his readers and some parodies that are sure to give you a chuckle or two. The people at Hewlett-Packard have a site with tips, including links to free templates and clip art that will give your newsletters some extra visual appeal.

Take advantage, too, of holiday gatherings to collect family stories and snap lots of pictures. If you have a parent or grandparent who’s especially hard to shop for, consider giving them the gift of family history. You can learn how by contacting me, or another of the nearly 700 members of the Association of Personal Historians that are located in just about every part of the United States and Canada. It’s a priceless gift that will be appreciated by family members for generations to come.

Have you seen the credit card ad about family history that’s been running on national television lately? You can view the one-minute Citi spot about a father-son team exploring their Scandinavian roots here.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of The Bimz.

Goodbye Thanksgiving; hello Black Friday

Does anyone else see the irony in how the day after Thanksgiving has come to be known as “Black Friday?” The juxtaposition of these two days gives us an opportunity to celebrate the best and worst that American culture has to offer in the span of 48 hours.

Thanksgiving is a time for reflection, an opportunity to catch our breath, share stories and enjoy a hearty meal with loved ones as we express gratitude for the bountiful opportunities afforded to most of us who are privileged to live in the United States of America.

Then, sometimes even before that last piece of pumpkin pie has been digested, we head to the mall, credit card in hand, ready to fuel what has become an insatiable Christmas machine.

The day after Thanksgiving has long been a huge Christmas shopping day, but every year it gets a bit more surreal. In our area this year, a mall opened at midnight on Thanksgiving night, enticing shoppers with live music, free coffee and the tease of a free car (actually, a two-year lease). Other stores just opened early, as soon as 4 a.m. It’s probably the same where you live.

Unless real news happens today, I can count on Christmas shopping being the lead story on tonight’s local TV news. Shoppers will comment on the crowds and the great buys they found. Merchants will say how great business was. Within three weeks, the same stations will be reporting on shortages of certain toys and how sales are below expectations.

Stan Freberg, that clever satirist who gently jabbed contemporary society during a lengthy career that began in 1950, used a sharper stick when he took on the commercial aspects of the holiday in his classic “Green Christmas.” What Freberg saw as satire in 1958 has come to pass in reality, and then some. I’m sure even Freberg was stunned when the Leader of the Free World told Americans to help combat terrorism by going shopping in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

My grandmother often told the story of how thrilled she was as a young girl in Denmark when she received an orange at Christmas. One orange. Imagine that. That sort of gratitude is the true spirit of Thanksgiving.

Listen to the stories of how your own family functioned before we became a consumer society. They contain valuable lessons for us all.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. If you’d like to know more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of  corey_coffman.

My name is Larry and I am not a crook

My name is Larry Lehmer. Well, it’s actually Lawrence but just about everyone who actually knows me calls me Larry. Lawrence is used primarily for legal and business purposes and to help me screen out those phone calls from people who don’t actually know me but would have me believe I should know them, and share my worldly goods and/or knowledge with them.

My surname is certainly not the most common one around, but it’s not the most unusual, either. Nevertheless, it’s led to some confusion at times.

First, the pronunciation. It’s Laymer, not Leemer or Lemmer. I understand why people have trouble with the first syllable, but am totally befuddled how it often comes out Lehman. I suspect some people are just lazy readers, capturing the first part of a word and letting their imagination fill out the rest.

I would never use my last name on a waiting list at a restaurant. It’s on occasions like that where I often use a fictional name, like Bevo or Giuseppi (I let them spell that one phonetically).

Once in high school, the vice principal summoned a handful of ne’er-do-wells to his office for punishment. One of the names he read sounded similar to mine, once you took into account his routine butchering of names. Rather than risk further wrath, I showed up and he determined I was not the guilty party. “You’re lucky you’re not him,” he bellowed. Actually, luck had nothing to do with it.

As an adult, I’ve received phone calls from detectives in Iowa and adjacent states seeking to snare a fellow who was renting things and not returning them. My “crime?” I had a similar name and was listed in a phone book while the actual culprit was smart enough not to have his name and phone number in print.

What about you? How has your name impacted your own personal history? How about people close to you? As individuals, we are unique. Unfortunately, our names rarely are.

To read an earlier post I did on names, go here

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. If you’d like to know more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of  Larry Bourgeois "Bobo".

My novel cure for "The 161 Meme"

Uh-oh. I’ve been tagged with “The 161 Meme.”

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, think of a meme as a chain letter. Someone poses a question to five bloggers, who respond with a post or comment before tagging five more bloggers with the same question. And on and on. I was tagged by Terry Thornton at Hill Country of Monroe County, Mississippi.

For this meme, I’m to check page 161 of the book I am currently reading, find the sixth sentence on the page and post it. For me, the book is “The Widow of the South” by Robert Hicks. It’s rare that I read fiction, but Hicks inspired me to read his novel after I heard him speak recently at the 2007 Conference of the Association of Personal Historians.

The sixth sentence on page 161 reads: “During the battle he must have been shot in the head, grazed probably, but you can lose a whole lot of blood that way.” Since my actual reading is only at page 71, this is more or less a preview of things to come. I’m really enjoying the book, by the way, and Hicks’ attention to detail tells the story of the Civil War in terms that magnify the true horror of having a war fought in your own backyard.

Now it’s time to do some tagging of my own. My five choices are:

1. Christie Vilsack, the former first lady of Iowa. Christie has an interest in personal history and has created the Vilsack Foundation that promotes literacy, storytelling and community building, among other things.

2. Carla Offenburger. Carla is the wife of my former colleague Chuck Offenburger, who was blogging for years before the term became fashionable. Carla is a regular contributor to the family web site, including her popular column, “What’s Carla Reading?”

3. Marc Hansen. Think of Marc, a columnist at The Des Moines Register, as a professional blogger. A long-time friend, Marc is a must-read in my house. I hope he will at least post a comment on what he’s reading these days.

4. Kathleen Bell. One of my favorite bloggers, Kathleen blogs from New Bedford, Mass., where she writes about everything from her days as a child in the Philippines to her exploits as a busy mother of six. Oh yes, she’s also pursuing her masters in journalism from Harvard Extension.

5. Braudia. This is a family two-fer. My son, Bret, and his bride, Claudia, are blogging from their new home in Durham, England. They haven’t been there long, but I hope one of them has found time to dig into a good book.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of thomas ford memorial library.

Listen: It's harder than it sounds

 

Are you a good listener? Most of us think we are, but are we really?

Have you ever found yourself listening to someone’s story that is so long and/or boring that your mind wanders? Or has their story triggered a story of your own that your mind starts retelling, overriding what the other person is saying?

Listen was the theme of the 2007 Conference of the Association of Personal Historians. It’s critical that interviewers concentrate on what they’re being told since that, after all, is the entire point of the interview process.

Conference host Jane Baxter opened the gathering in Nashville by reminding us that our own expectations are often a barrier to a successful interview. “Drop your expectations,” Jane said. “You may miss something if you’re not paying attention.”

Bridget Kling, a prize-winning producer for Nashville Public Television, added: “Take your time to listen to what they tell you and what they’re not telling you.”

A few days before the conference, Jane took to a Nashville studio where she recorded a song she wrote, “Listen.” You can find the song on her Roots and Branches Productions web site. Pay particular attention to the lyrics and I’m sure Jane would appreciate any e-mail comments you might have.

Videographer Peter Savigny of White Plains, N.Y., made a last-minute decision to join APH and attend the conference. He was particularly impressed by James Walsh’s presentation. After leaving Nashville, Peter shared with fellow APHers his new credo, which neatly sums up what we personal historians do:
    Photos and memories are silent.
    Silence gives no information.
    Everyone can contribute remembrances and details.
    Our job is to align those details & images and bring a voice to them.
    For now and forever.

In Nashville, Peter showed a video he made of his 4-year-old son. The charming production serves as a time capsule of a youngster’s view of the world. Check out the “Tell Me a Story” link on his Heirloom Biography web site.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. If you’d like to know more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Life on the Death Beat: It’s not your parents’ obituary

There’s a maxim in journalism that goes roughly like this: “The average person is guaranteed of getting his name in the paper twice in his lifetime – when he’s born and when he dies. Don’t screw either of those up.”

For many of us, our public legacies reside in the obituaries that appear in print a day or two after our death. Hopefully, our families and others close to us will keep us in their hearts beyond that date, but those newsprint tributes are often the last written chapter to our life story.

The late British writer Quentin Crisp once said, “An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.”

I encourage people in my legacy letter writing classes to write their own obituaries. When faced with the challenge of condensing your life to 250 words or so it forces you to focus on those things most important to you. That focus is critical in writing a legacy letter or ethical will and is a good starting point for a full-blown personal history.

Plus, in these days of paid death notices, it’s important to document your life story in such a way that truly reflects your life as succinctly as possible.

I attended a workshop on obituary writing at the recent national conference of the Association of Personal Historians. Prize-winning obituary writers Larken Bradley (The Point Reyes Light), Alana Baranick (Cleveland Plain Dealer) and Kay Powell (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) lamented the paid-obituary trend and represented the finest of what is something of a dying breed at U.S. newspapers, the professional obituary writer.

Fortunately, APH members like myself can provide the same services that newspapers are abandoning. There’s also help available on line. Check out Obit magazine or the Obituary Forum run by Alana. She’s also co-written a guide to obituary writing, “Life on the Death Beat.”

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of Robert of Fairfax.

The book of John: Fascinating, captivating and unwritten

By any measure, John Seigenthaler’s personal history is fascinating.

A self-described “son of the racist South,” Seigenthaler grew up in Nashville where, although a parent read to him every night, he considered the black women employed by his family to be his surrogate mothers. Still, if a black person passed him while heading to the rear of a city bus, he didn’t see them.

“If you were white, you were blind to their existence,” Seigenthaler said during his presentation at the 2007 Conference of the Association of Personal Historians in Nashville earlier this week.

That changed one day in the late 1940s as Seigenthaler worked in the control tower at McDill Field in Tampa, Florida. From his vantage point he could see his fellow airmen spill out from the barracks below, whites on one side, blacks on the other. Suddenly, it struck him. This is wrong.

“Where was my mind?” he said. “Where was my heart?”

When he left the service, Seigenthaler had the great fortune of having an uncle that served on the board of a newspaper group. Pick where you want to work, said the uncle. Seigenthaler picked Nashville’s Tennessean, a feisty, aggressive newspaper where he saw effecting change as a possibility.

Seigenthaler joined a newsroom staff that in the late 1950s was overflowing with young talent that would make its mark for decades to come. There was David Halberstam, the Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist and author; Tom Wicker, a one-time New York Times Washington bureau chief and author of several books about U.S. presidents; Fred Graham, now a Court TV anchor who then was wrapping up his law studies at Vanderbilt University and Wallace Westfeldt, who went on to produce the Huntley and Brinkley news shows for NBC-TV.

Student sit-ins had their birth in Nashville around that time, putting the young reporters at the forefront of a movement that would ignite change across the land. But, when new management shifted coverage of the emerging civil rights struggle to the Associated Press, the discouraged luminaries departed. That included Seigenthaler, who became an assistant to attorney general Bobby Kennedy in the early 1960s.

It was in this role that Seigenthaler was badly beaten and hospitalized during a Freedom Ride confrontation. Another change in management at The Tennessean resulted in Seigenthaler’s return. He would continue in the newspaper business for the rest of his career, except for a brief stint with Kennedy’s ill-fated presidential campaign in 1968.

Most recently, he has written a book about President James J. Polk but Seigenthaler admitted to the gathering of personal historians this week that he has yet to start on his own memoirs.

“It’s just in the last couple of years I’ve started to think ‘What am I going to do with all this stuff’?” the 80-year-old Seigenthaler said. “If I don’t get it down, I’ll feel disappointed. I guess I’ll feel kind of like a failure. We’ve all got these great stories to tell.”

Luckily for Seigenthaler, he’s left a voluminous public record of his life. The rest of us are rarely so fortunate. The time to collect those stories that are important to us is now.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. If you’d like to know more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Photo: John Seigenthaler in Nashville by lwlehmer.

"Soldiers of storytelling" turn family history into drama

I heard James Walsh speak Sunday. I was impressed.

Walsh, a history instructor at the University of Colorado in Denver, has a unique way of making history relevant to his students. He assigns each of them the task of interviewing four relatives and, working in groups of eight students, use that information to write a play, which they perform. The process is inspiring and the performances are raw and powerful.

That was the backdrop for the message Walsh delivered at the 2007 Conference of the Association of Personal Historians in Nashville on Sunday morning.

Walsh’s own story is pretty amazing. He owns up to not being a particularly dedicated student as he grew up in the mill country of Pennsylvania, even though that business was dying and family urged him on to higher education. Walsh did manage to snag a wrestling scholarship to Duke University, where his eyes were opened culturally and academically.

It was at Duke where a professor took him to task for his own lack of self-awareness.

“Walsh, how many people in the history of the world will see the world from your perspective?” he was asked. After Walsh’s expected reply, the professor challenged him: “Who will tell those stories from that viewpoint if you don’t?”

The Walsh method of entwining personal histories to spin compelling drama seems to be effective. He’s taught over 3,000 students this way, 130 at a time, over the past eight years. He read from some students’ work on Sunday and told tales of the intensely personal nature of the Cold War, how a collection of wingnuts revealed a bit of unknown family history and the horror of discovering that Grandma met Grandpa while skinnydipping. Walsh also played an excerpt from the Alan Berliner documentary, “Nobody’s Business,” which touches on many of the sensitive issues associated with a family history project.

Walsh describes his students as “soldiers of storytelling.” I wondered how his students described him, so I checked the web site, Rate My Professors. Among the comments: “Walsh is an amazing professor. His teaching style questions the humanity of the world” and “I highly recommend him to anyone who is studying history and like a professor with passion and who is interesting. He makes the students think.”

He scored high on the “Helpful” scale and low on the “Easy” scale, which I interpret as a good thing. He also scored an average 4 (out of 5) on the “Hotness” scale. I guess that’s good, too.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family stories. If you’d like to know more, check out his web site or send him an e-mail.

Photo: James Walsh at APH Conference in Nashville.

Storytelling: The art of saving real history

In my role as a personal historian, I’ve interviewed many people who survived The Great Depression. I’ve documented their experiences as they struggled with drought, disease, heartbreak, poverty and chinch bugs.

But none of them lived through the horror of the 2,500 people of Franklin, Tennessee, who woke the morning of Dec. 1, 1864, to find over 9,000 dead Union and Confederate soldiers in their backyard, the result of an hours-long battle the night before that ended with doomed soldiers trampling over corpses of the fallen, the sharp sound of crackling bones intermingled with moans of the dying in the waning hours of the slaughter.

The Battle of Franklin is the pivot point of “The Widow of the South,” the best-selling novel by Robert Hicks, our keynote speaker Saturday at the 2007 Conference of the Association of Personal Historians.

Hicks is a first-rank storyteller in that fine Southern style. His presentation was centered around that battle, which some Civil War historians have called “the last hurrah of the Confederacy.” He also told the tale of his brash introduction to noted Civil War historian Shelby Foote in Memphis and how he recruited an unlikely ally to persuade Foote to temporarily suspend his policy of “not inscribing books for strangers.”

But it was Hicks’ telling of the legacy of Carrie McGavock that reveals how historical fiction “is about how ordinary people can become extraordinary people because of circumstances.” It was McGavock, the heroine of Hicks’ novel, and her husband John who cared for hundreds of wounded soldiers following the Battle of Franklin and provided two acres of their Carnton Plantation for the final resting place for 1,500 of the dead.

One of the points Hicks made was that formal historians don’t preserve history, storytellers do. Keep that in mind as you collect your own family stories

Another blogger. My friend Stefani Twyford of Legacy Multimedia in Houston, Texas, is also blogging from the conference. Stefani specializes in video and does a great job. She’s also one of the few people I know who’s brave enough to karaoke “Keep On Chooglin’.”Check out her blog.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. If you’d like to know more, check out his web site or send him an e-mail.

Photo: Author Robert Hicks signs a copy of  "The Widow of the South" for past APH president Lettice Stuart.