Preserve Your Family History by Writing Family Stories

"Everyone has a story to tell." It seems like a cliche—but it's true. After working as a newspaper reporter for more than eight years, I know that everyone does, indeed, have a story to tell.

But even before I started working as a journalist, I knew that life experiences make interesting stories. Consider my parents.

My mother was the daughter of Norwegian immigrants, and her grandfather homesteaded our dairy farm in Wisconsin in the late 1800s. My father was the son of German and Scottish immigrants. When Dad was a little boy, his parents worked as cooks in a lumber camp in northern Wisconsin. As I was growing up, Mom and Dad would tell stories about their own childhoods. When Mom was a little girl, the whole family would sleep in the screen porch on hot summer nights. Indians also used to stop at our farm, and gypsies would camp nearby during the summer. When Dad was a little boy, he enjoyed spending time at the lumber camp kitchen because all of the cooks knew that little boys needed special treats during the day: a piece of Key-Lime pie, a slice of chocolate cake, or a couple of extra-large sugar cookies. When Dad wasn't staying with his parents at the lumber camp, he lived with his grandmother, a tiny tough-as-nails German woman who owned a German shepherd named Happy.

Unfortunately, I never wrote down any of those stories, and I never asked Mom and Dad to sit down with a tape recorder and tell those stories. My mother died in 1985 at the age of 68, and my father passed away in 1992 at the age of 78. The majority of their stories, except for the few that I remember, are lost forever. Your family stories do not have to share the same fate.

Here are some tips for writing your family stories: