Working with Your Contacts

Who Can Speak to an Earlier Time?Organizing People Resources, first draft
A most useful resource for local history are the families of the area who have studied, lived, and recorded events in the town and may have documents, pictures, and artifacts dating back 70 or 80 years of their own lives and an additional 20 to 50 years from their parents and grandparents recollections.
Objective: Identify people who can provide you with historical information from the Northern Catskills.

Local History Through the Recollections of Others
The Association of Personal Historians is an international organization of people passionate about preserving life stories. Their site is extremely useful be you interested in saving your own story or wanting to help someone else record their life story.

CONTENT: Benefits of preserving your story; a list of questions to ask yourself about what you hope to accomplish and FAQ, helpful things to think about before you begin, tips for interviewing relatives, practical tips and insights into writing life stories, deciding what formats are available to preserve your story, what kinds of content you want to include in your life story, self-publishing options and working with print-on-demand publishers, and a broad list of other resources.
Objective: To thoroughly investigate and organize the options open to you in developing a personal history.

Local History Through the Recollections of Others
We have four sources of information on local history available to us: people, pictures, artifacts, and documents. This article covers the first of these resources: people as a source for interpreting or confirming oral history, and focuses on techniques for interviewing them.
Objective: To conduct a quality interview and developing an essay on some aspect of local history.

Possible Forthcoming Topics
Feedback from you needed!