What to Expect from an Oral Interview

These personal history interviews will be detailed and will cover your entire life, beginning with what you remember about your grandparents, parents, siblings, cousins, and your aunts and uncles. Then we’ll discuss your (or your parents' or grandparents') childhood, elementary school years, high school, college, courtship, marriage, work, children, and grandchildren. We will record about 8-10 hours of audio, in your home or office, (about one hour for each topic), and scan your family and ancestral photos. The photos will be added to the finished interview book providing great insight into the events of your life.

The interview will then be transcribed and edited. An edited copy will be returned to you to make sure that we have names, dates, and places spelled correctly. At this time you will be given the chance to remove anything that, upon hindsight, you wish to delete. We will take the corrected manuscript and add the photos to prepare for printing. The manuscript will then be professionally layed out and sent to the printer where it will be hardbound with a dust jacket. You will then let us know how many copies of the hardbound book you would like to have. Although we can print additional copies at a later date it is much more cost effective to print all the copies you think you will need at one time.

Oral Interview Sample

Below is an example of a finished oral interview in book form.  Click (or click and drag) the arrows in the bottom corners to turn the pages.  Right click any page to zoom in for easier reading.

View the sample book.