Our Founder Speaks

The Universal Need to Tell Stories

Remembering—passing down your stories and accumulated wisdom from generation to generation—is a universally recognized and respected life stage in every culture except ours. Our culture’s motto has been, “Live for the present, build for the future, and don’t dwell on the past.”

Lately we’ve seen a change: People in every city and village in North America are now rushing around to interview their elders or write down their own memoirs. Whether they document their stories in a ballad, quilt, video, CD, DVD, scrapbook, Web site, or book, they’re responding to a need to remember and make personal sense of the world.

Go to the local photocopy shop and you’ll see an amazingly steady number of customers working with old family photos that they want to memorize. Why? Because remembering and learning from personal experience is a basic human instinct that is finally reasserting itself in our lives.

So many people are trying to capture their elders’ memories or conducting their own life reviews that we’re approaching the “tipping point”. It won’t be long before these projects are understood as even more important than a vacation.

We now understand that we need to nourish our roots, learn from our elders, figure out our lives, and pass down what we’ve learned. The flip side is loneliness, alienation, and possibly social violence. The need for remembering and passing down personal or group history is universal in every category of race, income, ethnicity, and lifestyle.

In 1994, after a decade at the helm of New England’s alternative newsweeklies The Valley Advocate and Springfield Advocate (New Mass Media), I listened to the Tracy Chapman song, "Tell It Like It Is," and realized that as important as investigative news stories were, it was time to do my part to build the nascent memoir and life-review movement. I hunkered down with my mother and put her life story into fancy book form to last as far as the seventh generation, as Chief Seattle advised, and started Modern Memoirs, Inc.

The Association of Personal Historians came into being as a trade association so that memoir-oriented businesses can pool their knowledge and resources. One business led to another—most notably, the vast networks of Denis Ledoux of Soleil Lifestory Network (Turning Memories into Memoirs writing workshops) in Maine, Audrey Galex of Roots and Wings Video Productions in Atlanta, and Bruce Washburn of Goose Wings Passages in North Carolina. The growth of the industry in general, and our business members in particular, has been encouraging.

APH members’ businesses are owned and run by inspired entrepreneurs who see their role not only as businesspeople but as architects and builders who can help their clients fulfill their significant ethical obligations. Everyone has a life history, so our field is large. Every level of product is represented in the APH today, from businesses that put together scrapbooks and quilts to businesses that create feature films and literary masterpieces.

Ten years ago, I hoped that preserving personal and family stories would be considered a necessity by the year 2005. I felt that these documents would be legitimate heirlooms, even more valued than silverware or diamond earrings. I hoped that they would be understood as gifts more precious than the money it took to produce them. And it has come to pass. People everywhere now recognize the value and importance of their legacies.

We in the APH count our pioneering work as successful and are happy to help you find an appropriate format for reviewing and passing along your life experiences. You’re the gatekeeper of history. Let us help you tell your story.

By Kitty Axelson-Berry
Founder, Association of Personal Historians, Inc.
Modern Memoirs Publishing
Amherst, Massachusetts