The Oral History Project is now underway. I bought the toys yesterday, namely a digital voice recorder and speech recognition software. Today I visited my grandmother and, with a little prompting, got her started down the reminiscence road. She talked for about an hour and a half and I got some great stories.
For example, her brother Worth was killed as a young man. I had always known this, but never really knew what happened. It turns out that he was stabbed by his uncle in a fit of jealousy.
I also found out that my great-grandfather, Newt, had worked as a streetcar driver in Birmingham. I didn’t even know he had lived in Birmingham. I can place him in Georgia during each census year, so that just goes to show the limitations of relying on census data for the places that a person lived.
I’ll be writing up these stories and others after I learn how to use the Dragon software to transcribe my recordings. I also hope to edit the recordings and come up with some usable audio files.
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This post moved from http://toniasroots.blogspot.com/ October 5, 2008