These are our stories

My father died 25 years ago today. Most of this blog, which started out as a column for the Herald for Father’s Day 2001 and has since...

My hometown newspaper, where I spent nearly 20 years of workdays, moved from a two-story, red-brick building dating to the 1930s into...

Remember the time my nieces Ella, Grace and Sarah attended the father-daughter Girl Scout dance and walked into the fortune-teller’s tent...

“Storytelling is an art in the mountains, a way of transmitting history, culture, and shared experience from generation to generation.“...

A copy of Reef Points is among the more intriguing doations I’ve come across at the thrift store where I work. The US. Navy’s official...

Earlier this month, my medical records at Community South Cancer Center were changed from non-Hodgkin lymphoma, diffuse large B-cell, to...

After a fitful few hours of sleep, yesterday I awoke to a day with no Dawn. The day before, she died. Most unexpectedly. Age 59. Dawn and...

One hundred years ago this summer, Frank and Anna (Schroeder) Rasche welcomed son Ernest into the world. Forty-three years and some...

For as long as I can remember, I knew that I once had an uncle Roman. For just as long, I knew that he died as a teenager when he was...

"History isn't usually told by the bigwigs of the era, even if they are some of its main characters. Instead, it is often reconstructed...

Three weeks ago, I led a Life Stories session at the history center of an adjacent county. It was our sixth of eight sessions, the time I...

At the end of our lives, we become only memories. If we're lucky, someone is passing those down. — Plum Johnson, "They Left Us Everything"

I spent Monday afternoons this past fall leading Life Stories classes for religious sisters in a nearby town. Three of the sisters in the...

I do book folding. Despite the name, it’s actually the pages of books that get folded. I fold old books — one page at a time, two folds...

One of my first Life Stories clients, Mary, died last month. She was 94. Her father had been a sharecropper in Kentucky, and soon after I...

Alice and Edwin participated in my most recent Life Stories class. Alice had a career as a beautician. In her beauty shop, she had a Coke...

Six weeks before Judy was born, her father died in a car accident. So Judy and her mother moved in with her mother’s parents, Judy’s...

His days of making and flying kites with the neighborhood boys took place more than 70 years ago, but to hear Paul describe it during a...

"Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity there is no...

This past Saturday I ran into a client whose life stories I completed writing early last year. Bernice, who became a widow during the...