Ask yourself these questions – if your parents, grandparents, and other ancestors did not leave life histories, do you wish they had? Do you wish you could read about their lives? If so, it is likely for your descendants to feel the same way if you don’t.
This is your chance to commission research that can be of great personal interest to you and your family. A record of your life can be a great gift to those who come after you, or those that are currently around you. Words in print can be read and reread, pondered over, and returned to.
Oral histories and family, or community storytelling traditions are how most of us were gifted our heritage. Today, with the growth of digital technologies there is a risk that we assume the memories will somehow automatically be collected and preserved, and all too late we find they are lost. This need not be so since these same new technologies are offering us superb and affordable methods of capturing, illustrating, enriching, and presenting our family and community stories.
We have experience of working with mediums from
- face-to-face,
- video and audio, or
- written-online,
semi-structured interviews, across different generations and subjects such as
- individual and family histories,
- musicology,
- politics and activism,
- military histories.
As historians, we can also place these personal memories within the bigger historical picture and set them against the local or world events which influenced the lives of the subjects.
We would strongly urge you to contact us so that – at no cost to you – together we can chat through exactly what it is you wish to achieve and what you expect. We can then design a bespoke package to suit your requirements.
This makes a unique gift, that the whole family and beyond can appreciate at a very affordable cost. But more than that, it can also serve as a legacy document for generations to come.
The following examples are work completed by us and highlight the range of research that we are able to provide.
French Phillips Historical Consultancy 