Exploring encounters between families, their histories and archived oral histories

Abstract

As family historians are a key user group for so many archives, exploring the interaction between these two parties is crucial to enhance resource discovery, understand how families may react to recordings, and address issues that occur when access is widened to rich, and often hitherto inaccessible, archived interviews. Through case studies the authors outline how archived recordings add crucial context to family research and explore how some families have reacted when accessing a relative’s audio interview, including how the interview intersects with existing family histories. These examples will prove informative for those working with collections that contain oral history, and help archivists, family historians and oral historians to make more use of archived resources. Finally the authors consider how internet access to catalogue data and archived recordings brings new perspectives to the researcher, but also poses ethical challenges. With a greater number of users of the data and recording – often without the need to visit the archive in person – it is necessary to explain whose voices and views are represented and the onus is on the oral history and archive communities to find innovative solutions to present oral histories in a manner which retains context and provenance.

Keywords:

• Oral history
• family history
• ethics
• online access
• audio recording

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Rob Perks, Emily Hewitt and the ARA reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

1. See the results of the 2014/2015 UK Sound Directory.

2. See the report on the Cultural Consulting website.

3. For an overview of developments in UK oral history see Smith, The Making of Oral History.

4. For good overviews on current oral history theory and practice see Smith’s booklet Oral History; all three editions of the Perks and Thomson, The Oral History Reader; Abrams, Oral History Theory.

5. The Oral History Society has been the leading UK charity for oral history for over 40 years. The oral history community in the UK is a broad church and includes academic researchers, historians, projects based within community settings and those working in the archives, libraries and museums sectors.

6. Some interesting reflections on interviewing within the family are Finnegan, “Family Myths Memories and Interviewing”; Borland, “That’s Not What I Said.”; Field, “Shooting at Shadows”; Zembrzycki, According to Baba; and the special issue of Canadian journal Oral History Forum d’histoire orale 29 (2009), “Remembering Family”.

7. The Leicester Oral History Archive was one of a number of projects funded nationally by the Manpower Services Commission, and recorded 505 interviews between 1983 and 1989.

8. The ‘elephants’ were of the sugar variety, produced by a local confectioner as a Christmas treat along with sugar mice and pigs.

9. For a discussion on the nature of working class communities see Bourke, “Locality: retrospective communities”.

10. Brown, Wharf Street Revisited, 48.

11. Ibid., 25.

12. Ibid., 26.

13. Interview with Mrs. Eileen Bantan.

14. Wharf Street Revisited, 87.

15. Ibid., 57.

16. Ibid., 58.

17. Ibid., 115.

18. For a fuller discussion of what oral histories can reveal about perceptions of ‘community spirit’, see Ramsden, “The role of the industrial workplace”; Ramsden, “The community spirit was a wonderful thing,” 89–97. The latter also provides an overview of the literature on nostalgia and community.

19. See, for example Imperial War Museum Sound Collections and East Midlands Oral History Archive (EMOHA), “Leicestershire & Rutland Remember the First World War”.

20. See the George Ewart Evans collection, “The Survey of English Dialects” and “Learning Resource ‘Sounds Familiar’”. For a discussion of the use of these collections for dialect research, see Perks and Robinson, “The way we speak”.

21. For further tips for interviewing one’s own family, see the Information for Family Historians section on the Oral History Society website.

22. Bornat, “Crossing boundaries with secondary analysis”.

23. Bornat, “Timescapes Methods Guides Series 2012”; Jackson, Smith and Olive, “Families remembering food”.

24. Cadbury, NLS Review and Accounts 2006/2007.

25. Perks and Robinson “The Way We Speak,” 83.

26. For the article which considers this issue in full, see Stewart, “Exploring family reactions”.

27. A clear example is Kikimura, “Family life histories”.

28. Matthew, interviewed by Mary Stewart. His grandmother, Elinor, was also interviewed by the British Library.

29. Private letter to interviewer from the widow of an interviewee July 2003, Book Trade Lives, C872, British Library.

30. ‘Lucas’ interviewed by Barbara Gibson, track 2.

31. Charles Pick interviewed by Sue Bradley.

32. Martin Pick interviewed by Mary Stewart.

33. Ibid.

34. Letter from an interviewee’s daughter to curator, January 2009, Women Conscientious Objectors C880, British Library.

35. Email and letter correspondence between curator and son of interviewee, September 2006–July 2007, Architects’ Lives, C467, British Library.

36. A few recent examples are the obituary of Roy Dommett and an account by biographer Michael Bird.

37. For a more in-depth discussion of this point see Stewart, “Exploring family reactions,” 60–1.

38. Some examples are British Library Sound and Moving Image catalogue, the Imperial War Museum Collections, and Essex Archives online. The Save Our Sounds project, run by the British Library, is likely to increase access to both the catalogue data and content for many collections across the UK.

39. For an excellent discussion of the impact of digital technology and changing expectations from archival researchers see Boyd, “I just want to click on it to listen”; Bradley and Puri, “Creating an Oral History Archive”.

40. Courtney, “Using the Archive” in NLS Review and Accounts 2008/2009.

41. ^Jane Dowling interviewed by Anna Dyke, track 20.

42. Wharf Street Revisited, 87.

43. The letter stated that if objections were not raised within a certain time period (usually several months hence) then interviews would be released online, where the Library had been assigned copyright and in compliance with any access restrictions as stated on the original Recording Agreement. If an interviewee was known to be dead, then interviews were released online in accordance with terms stated on the original Recording Agreement. ‘There is also a ‘take down’ notification procedure on the Sounds website, for registering queries and complaints.’

44. The interview was from An Oral History of British Science. The incident took place in 2014 and was handled by the Assistant Archivist and Lead Curator, with input from the interviewer.

45. The interview was from The Living Memory of the Jewish Community. The incident first arose in 2013 and was handled by the Assistant Archivist and Lead Curator. At the time of writing the material is unavailable online, pending the resolution of other issues relating to copyright.

46. This interview is from Crafts Lives. The complaint was made in 2014 and was handled by the Assistant Archivist and Lead Curator.

47. In early 2016 the Lead Curator and Assistant Archivist resolved a case with the family members of a person described in an Architects’ Lives interview by annotating the content summary with a statement displayed in square brackets which provided an alternative version of events.

48. The Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) developed at the University of Kentucky offers some innovative delivery mechanisms for oral history online.

49. See the thoughtful reflection on family oral histories, photographs and objects from her late mother’s house; Wilton, “Imaging Family Memories”.