The Genealogy Bug and Storytelling

Today I'm delighted to introduce a guest blogger, John Moore.  John is the Chief of Wahoo at Brains on Fire. Brains on Fire is a Marketing Advertising firm the company I work for uses. John is also an Author and Speaker. I hope you enjoy John’s post today as I know that I will. Thanks again to John for taking the time to post as a guest on my Blog.

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I passed another maturity milestone in my life when the genealogy bug bit me last year. Sure I wanted to know when my recent ancestors were born and where they died. But, I also wanted to modernize all the photos my parents had collected over the years by digitizing them.

So last year I dug through all the historical family records and photos my mother had stored in various boxes. What I found was an amazing collection of scrapbooks from the 1920s, baby books of my parents, and photos dating back the late 1800s. I spent hours scanning in all the family ancestry goodies.

But there was a problem. I had the photos but not the stories. Sure, every photo is worth a thousand words but the story that goes with the photo is priceless.

I missed my opportunity to capture most of those stories when my mother passed away in 2007 from ALS. My mother was the story-keeper and (storyteller) of my family. When she died, the stories also died. (Before she lost her ability to talk, I did record her telling a few family stories but not nearly enough of them.)

Late last year I sat my father down in a comfy chair and videotaped him sharing remembrances of his life. We started with him talking about his father who died when my dad was five years old. The conversation continued with my father talking about his childhood growing up in Jackson, MS and it concluded with him talking about being the caretaker for his ailing wife.

I now have hours of video and thousands of photos to help tell some of these family stories. In drips and drabs I’m editing the videos into short documentaries and posting them online to a family ancestry website I created.

My motivation for sharing this is to inspire you to capture family stories before your family storytellers pass away.

The tools needed to capture family stories are now commonplace. All you need is a video camera (the one on your smartphone will do), a scanner, a laptop, and some basic video editing skills. That’s all I used to create the following video of my father talking about his father.


You can view my family ancestry goodies at: www.MooreHistory.Us

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When John Moore isn’t dabbling in family ancestry stuff, he is a marketer working at Brains on Fire in Greenville, SC. John also blogs at www.BrandAutopsy.com.