Start & Run a Personal History Business. Jennifer Campbell

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      1. What Is a Personal Historian? An Introduction

      When I tell people I’m a personal historian, sometimes I hear, “A what?” or, “Like, you do genealogy?” After a quick explanation — “Well, genealogy and personal history are related fields,” — I explain that I help people tell their life stories and publish them in heirloom books for their families and future generations. Within a minute, they’re telling me about a relative who’s led such an interesting life who really should do his memoirs. Or, sadly, about a relative who just passed away and used to tell great stories but no one got a chance to write them down, and now that branch of the family has lost its history. It seems everyone knows somebody who needs a personal historian.

      What does a personal historian do? A personal historian steps into other people’s lives for a brief, intense time, asking questions about their background, ancestors, events, and experiences that shaped their lives, relationships, foibles, struggles, accomplishments, regrets, highlights, and low lights — whatever memories, thoughts, feelings, and reflections they wish to talk about and have preserved. In a typical book project, a personal historian guides a person through the telling of his or her life’s stories (or some aspect of his or her life) for a number of hours, records the interviews, transcribes word-for-word, and organizes, edits, and rewrites the transcripts into a polished narrative. Once the manuscript is completed, photos and memorabilia can be added to enhance the story, and everything is laid out in book form and published for the author, his or her family, and friends.

      In Start & Run a Personal History Business, space dictates that I focus only on personal history books, but these “how-to” guidelines and practices can be applied to a wide variety of products and formats, from audio or video recordings, books, quilts and art collages, to multimedia presentations on DVD. See Chapter 15 about some of the exciting possible ways to capture and preserve memories.

      Personal historians preserve not only life stories, but also the histories of businesses, towns, families, places of worship, organizations, special-interest groups and ethnic groups, or groups such as veterans or hospice patients. Not everyone calls themselves a personal historian: there’s the corporate (or business) historian, community historian, public historian, legacy writer, biographer, memoir writer, ghostwriter, and oral historian, to name a few. A videobiographer is another professional in the field, using a camera and sophisticated equipment and software. Editors and coaches work on memoirs that are already written or are being written. Workshop leaders teach memoir writing. Others specialize in photograph restoration, archiving, writing obituaries, delivering eulogies (as “funeral celebrants”), graphic design, printing, and binding.

      What these professions have in common is a passion for preserving the past. I hope that Start & Run a Personal History Business ignites that passion in you, too.

      2. The World of Personal History

      2.1 A business that’s timely — and timeless

      This is a “hot” profession: a young industry with vast potential for income and growth. When I started Heritage Memoirs in 2002, I just wanted a creative outlet for my interviewing, writing, and editing skills. Through my father’s death and my mother’s dementia, I had lost my own family stories and thought there could possibly be a business helping other people avoid that loss. I never dreamed that, five years later, the Financial Post would name what I was doing one of the top ten business opportunities, to “serve the needs of luxury-seeking, time-pressed and suddenly health-conscious Canadians.” It said: “Personal Memoirs. Create a record of peoples’ parents or ancestors as a memorialist and put it in a handsome bound book. Must be able to write.”

      Interest in the field has caught on like wildfire. Personal historians and their clients have been featured in hundreds of major news outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Toronto Star, AARP: The Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Money, Worth, Real Simple, O Magazine and on television programs like The Oprah Show. It’s no surprise the media loves stories about personal history projects. They have all the elements of a feel-good feature article: human interest, history, connecting generations, celebrating the “ordinary” person, family values. And there is the unique nature of the product itself: beautiful, one-of-a-kind books that will last for generations. It’s history — living history — in the making!

      With a growing fascination in memoirs and genealogy, it was only a matter of time before entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to help people with their projects, but the term “personal historian” didn’t come into the mainstream until after 1995 when an enterprising group met in an eighteenth-century inn in New England. Mainly writers, they had carved out a niche market, getting paid to help people tell their life stories, and wanted a supportive network to discuss advances in the field, interviewing and recording techniques, resources, pricing, and to otherwise build a business doing what they were doing. But what should they call themselves? They tossed around the phrases “memoir writer,” “historian,” “biography writer,” and others, and finally settled on personal historian. It did the best job of capturing what we do: help tell and preserve the history of a person. That group formed the Association of Personal Historians (APH), and it remains the premier group for “entrepreneur story-savers.”

      2.2 The memoirs and genealogy phenomenon: Capturing the moment — Past, present, and future

      In the past 15 years, interest in memoirs, genealogy, and family history has exploded. Memoirs consistently dominate the bestseller lists, and not just those written by celebrities (or their ghostwriters). People are reading memoirs of everyday people, like Frank McCourt with his Pulitzer-prize winning memoir, Angela’s Ashes. No longer are memoirs only written by the elderly. The midlife memoir is quite common and, as I was writing this book, two American Idol contestants, barely out of their teens, were reported to be writing their memoirs. Like peeking into someone’s diary, we are fascinated with other people’s lives; the appeal of the memoir crosses all economic, geographic, racial, ethnic, and age segments.

      Along with reading about other people’s lives comes the passionate pursuit of writing about our own. Historically, writing one’s reminiscences was reserved for the elite; stories of everyday people, especially marginalized factions like the poor or women, were largely lost. Today there is a groundswell of memoir writers, meeting in libraries, church basements, and online to support each other as they document their experiences and pass them down to future generations. Thousands of websites are also devoted to the memoir genre.

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