A life story for your family and the world

So you want to produce a life story of someone… Maybe your own story, maybe someone else. And you want to record this life story because there is some information that you feel is worth capturing for posterity.

Maybe they were involved in some interesting events in history, or saw many and varied things that few people have the chance to see or maybe they know somethings about the people in your world that no one else knows. All good reasons for wanting to capture the memories of a person but what is the ultimate reason for going to all this effort?

After it’s recorded, then what?

Once the recording is captured you have half the project completed but if this is all you do, you may as well not have started in the first place.

The reason for creating a Life Story project is ultimately to share the information with others, enabling them to hear and learn about someone else’s world.

A Life Story is for other people to know.

It’s in the sharing and hearing a Life Story, where the real value exists. Without being heard a Life Story has no value but in sharing, these stories will live for as long as people listen. If you think recording a Life Story is a good idea it will be because you want to have others hear it, that’s the only valid reason for it’s existence.

Three groups want to hear your story

Peoples interest in your Life Story will vary, depending on interests and fall into one of three groups

* Immediate family

* Relatives and close friends

* Greater community

Initially those interested will be the immediate family who know and care about you and their involvement in your Life Story. These are the family members who are most emotionally involved with you and have the most detail knowledge and interest in your Life Story.

Then there will be your more distant relatives who share in the same heritage or the associates of your life who mixed and shared events with you during your lives. They don’t need to know everything but they have a general interest in how life has been for you.

Lastly, the greater community who aren’t emotionally involved and possibly don’t even know you but are keenly interested in the experiences of someone, “On the ground” during the events of a particular time. These are the historians and social scientists of the future who will be looking through this information to understand how life was during particular eras.

Locking a Life Story away

If you have concerns for privacy and feel that your Life Story is something that you want to keep close, to only your immediate family, you have several options for sharing. These include sending the digital files via email, sharing on removable systems such as CD’s and USB thumb drives or similar or using a private web site that requires password logins to access.

Some people never think that anyone, beyond immediate family would be interested, so never consider having a Life Story available for the greater community. What a shame to lock a story away only to be available to the few who know about it and not be available for the many who may be looking for information but will never find it because it secreted away.

Unless you’re active in physically distributing your Life Story it will simple fade from existence over time as components are lost. This will never happen with a fully maintained web site.

If privacy is of serious concern it’s also possible to use a combination of publicly available information while keeping any sensitive information held back until a future date or only shared in private using limited sharing techniques.