How will your history live on?
Life happens so fast. And suddenly it’s over, and gone is the chance to ask the ones we love to tell us, one more time, the stories they told around the dinner table, or to ask about the family’s untold stories.
It needn’t be too late. Story Lab West offers a wide range of family and organizational history services, including recording personal history interviews and creating tribute videos and mini documentaries.
Give the past a future and ensure that your memories are heard by future generations
Meet Ken McPherson
I am drawn to the stories of people. I was a career counselor teaching students how to do informational interviews as an essential part of their career research when I decided to do a few myself. Becoming an oral historian seemed to be a way to engage in more in-depth, uninterrupted interviews and listen to and record stories in their entirety. To learn more I joined the Association of Personal Historians and later the national Oral History Association and sought out informational interviews with oral historians at conferences and chapter meetings.
I began by recording audio interviews with family, friends, and co-workers and started Story Lab West. In 2008 I hired former students to help me make tribute videos and mini-documentaries. Along the way, I found that recording oral history and mini-documentaries added something meaningful to peoples’ lives. I am now exploring the technologies for making oral history recordings of groups and individuals more widely accessible with creativity and efficiency.
LET'S TELL YOUR STORY
At Story Lab West I am available to record the stories of your life’s work, art, education, family or culture. Stories of disappointment may be inevitable but can potentially be stories of resilience. Some oral history “narrators” (the modern jargon for interviewee) are witnesses to history, if only to their own personal history. I also want to consider projects that examine the impact that historic cultural events have had on communities with a shared memory of those events. I look forward to working with local institutions and groups to collaborate on group projects and on ways to use current technology such as OHMS (the Oral History Metadata Synthesizer) to produce oral histories with ever greater efficiencies and effectiveness and create useful public documentation of local history.
