Thanksgiving interviews

Are you getting ready for Thanksgiving and all the holidays that follow in the next several weeks? Don't forget to prepare some oral history questions to ask the relatives. I have some questions to ask the women in your family. Pick two or three to ask during dinner.

To add more to the flavor of the women in your family history, ask some emotion producing questions. Grandmothers, mothers, aunts, and cousins can add much to the family memories. Do it before these strong women are gone from this life. I wish I had asked my Grandma Gert what it was like to be 21 when women earned the right to vote in 1922. I would have had asked her mother, Nana, for details on growing up without a mother and why did they leave Canada. (She undoubtedly would have detailed all the relatives they used to visit in Montreal and Rawdon.) Some suggested areas of questions:

• What was it like to raise a family of 9 without electricity? (Or without inside plumbing, or something else)

• What was it like to vote for the first time (those alive when women got the right to vote)

• What was it like to make the decision to leave your home country and come to the U.S., Canada, England, or _____

• What was it like to walk the picket line during the ___ strike?

• What were the family dinners like as you were growing up?

Recording the life stories of hospice patients

Today's Salt Lake Tribune carried a story titled "Preserving their voices: S.L. County hospice records patients' stories." This is such a neat project. Hospice volunteers were trained to interview the patients and their families. The surviving family members each receive a CD of the interviews. The article states. "The Memory Catcher program was inspired by University of Utah English professor Meg Brady, who initiated an audio history program for terminal patients at the Huntsman Cancer Institute." 

I hope this Memory Catcher at Silverado Hospice of Utah spreads to other places. I have heard of projects to preserve family memories of patients in regular nursing home, but not those in hospice care. Just think of how neat it will be for these family members to listen to the recorded stories. I imagine that the interviews also helped the patient and family members in other ways -- including taking their minds off the inevitable end of life.