Everyday history saved on tape

Tell me about your first kiss. What was the neighborhood like that you grew up in? What was your happiest moment? What should the next generation know about our family?

Intriguing questions. The answers help form the history of a family. And every family has its own story. More and more, they're recording it for future generations.

For years Americans have traced their genealogies. But the coming of the new millennium and life-changing events such as Sept. 11 have spurred new interest in gathering contemporary accounts from family members while they are still here to record them.

Now two programs using 21st-century technology are making it easy for family members to record their stories.

"Telling Lives" is a pilot project of the American History Workshop, a consulting group founded by Richard Rabinowitz in 1980 to bring together historians, scholars, curators, filmmakers, artists, designers, and architects to find new ways of engaging citizens with history. Itaims to create a North American databank of memories from 100,000 people.

The first location, at the New-York Historical Society through Sept. 24, is capturing people's stories about their early school experiences.

The interest in the lives of North Americans - ordinary and extraordinary - has been growing, say Mr. Rabinowitz and others in the field. Biographies of both the famous and not-so-famous have become popular. "We're [still] interested in Ben Franklin or John Adams, but from a much more whole perspective," he says.

At "Telling Lives," visitors sit down at a computer terminal and record a 10-minute video about their early school days. They're prompted by a set of questions generated by the computer program, such as "I am (am not) the person I was in school."

In a waiting area outside the recording cubicle, a videotape of previously recorded interviews primes the mental pump for visitors. On it, one woman recalls how she took grade school so seriously that she was disdainful of other girls who brought their dolls to the first day of school.

Another remembers a student who paired up with a deaf girl to help her learn to read and in turn learned to read herself. Yet another adult tells of having a science project rejected because the teacher doubted the student had the ability to do it.

Eventually, Rabinowitz hopes to store the recordings at the University of Toronto so they can be easily searchable by topic. If the program wins funding to continue, he wants to explore other themes, such as family meals (which should reveal regional and ethnic differences), learning to drive (attitudes toward technology), and "my first job" (attitudes about work).

The "Telling Lives" project is "part of a larger cultural trend that says we're interested in diversifying the voices of the stories that are in museums, we're interested in the museum as a place of dialogue, we're interested in involving visitors as historians," Rabinowitz says. "In the last 25 years we've become much more interested in social history and the history of ordinary people."

"It's very important for us to understand how important our own stories are and to celebrate and honor that," says David Isay, a public-radio documentarymaker and the founder of StoryCorps.

Next month, this nonprofit organization will install its first soundproof StoryBooth at Grand Central Terminal in New York. Aided by a facilitator, visitors will be able to record their personal histories on a 40-minute audio CD for a nominal fee. StoryCorps will retain a copy for its database and for possible use in making public radio documentaries.

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