How to capture stories for memoirs about yourself, someone else in your family or your ancestors. Delaplane brings over twenty years of experience to this book in showing how she gathers stories from her celebrity clients and researches their history for custom-bound heirloom books. Topics covered are researching and organizing a project. Procedures for conducting oral history interviews. Crafting spellbinding anecdotes making them come alive. Important tips on how to best preserve photographs and other family memorabilia and proper conservation and archiving practices. Genealogy research tips and the most readable presentations for your genealogy results. Publishing and printing options.
About the Author: Kristin Delaplane helps people capture their family or company stories through oral history interviews and historical and genealogy research. The end result is then carefully crafted as a narrative for an heirloom book. Her clients have included notable American families and celebrities, including Best Actor Oscar winners and a Kennedy Center Honoree. Kristin's workshops on oral history methods and capturing family stories have been featured with the University of California, colleges, high schools, museums, historical societies, and private organizations. Her project management and consultancy services have been employed by business such as San Francisco's famed Buena Vista Café and Genentech Corporation. Named oral historian for the highly accredited Vacaville Museum in Solano County, California, Kristin initiated and oversaw a three-year project involving over sixty oral histories that resulted in a museum exhibit and the publication of "Solano's Gold: The People and Their Orchards." A newspaper feature on California history, "Echoes of Solano's Past," conceived and written by Kristin, appeared in the award-winning Vacaville Reporter from 1995 through 1999. In 1998, a television documentary, which was co-produced, written and narrated by Kristin, won a Cablevision Award. In 1998, she published "A Gold Hunter: Memoirs of John Berry Hill," which was based on her ancestor's California gold rush journal. The book was named an official California Sesquicentennial Resource. From 1972 to 1993, Kristin was the inquiring photographer columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. This column, "Question Man by Conti," was regarded as one of the best in its genre and garnered notable recognition including a day in San Francisco named for Kristin. Years of interviewing led to her oral history work and many of her projects are now archived with distinguished depositories.