Stefani Twyford's Blog (127)

This week marks the beginning of the holiday gift-giving season. Perhaps you are wondering what you might give to a fellow family history researcher or genealogist, or maybe your family and friends are asking you for hints.

Simple, practical gifts include a disposable camera to take to cemeteries, a package of photo paper, mini-cassette recorder for archive research or interviewing relatives, vinyl-coated paper clips, acid-free file folders and archival-safe, acid free and lignin-free…

I was watching some news coverage of Hurricane Sandy a few days ago and there was a woman standing on the site of what was once her home, holding a battered and soggy wedding photo of her parents. She was sobbing, saying this was the only photo she could find of her parents. It was painful to watch. For years, I have been writing about the need to protect heirloom property such as photos and scrapbooks. I can’t recall where I read this but insurance companies report that the number one loss…

Last week I was at an annual conference for the Association of Personal Historians in St. Louis, Missouri. This is my fourth conference to attend, and one of the highlights for me is catching up with people from all over the world that I communicate with regularly but don’t get to see in person all too often, as well as meeting new historians and learning about the work that they are up to.

This year I had the pleasure of having dinner with a Danish woman. She told me about a long…

First of all, what is oral history? Put simply it is a collection of testimonies by living persons to record their unique life stories. They are not based on gossip, hearsay or rumors. Instead, oral histories are chronicles of direct observations as told by the people who witnessed the events or lived through the experiences being described. They are taken straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak.

This can be a great way of capturing the life and times of your family, close…

A Hope Chest was originally used as a dowry. It was property that a woman owned and brought into her marriage. Some women could not find a suitable husband, for various factors; therefore, the dowry was used as a way of enticing a man into marriage.

The idea of a Hope Chest symbolizes so many hopes and dreams. It’s about seeing the future unfold before your very eyes and it’s about preserving a lifetime of memories and building a family legacy, a heritage. It’s a place where a young…

Planning on a beach getaway this summer? When it’s time to pack for that vacation you’ve been counting down the days to, remember to consider bringing along these extras to make vacation photography a breeze:

Bring Ziploc bags of different sizes. These are great for sand, dirt, and water proofing your cameras as well as your new and exposed rolls of film if you’re using film cameras.

For terrific shots from a boat, on the beach or under water, grab a couple of cheap, one-use…

A couple of months ago, a good friend of mine’s brother passed away unexpectedly. He was in his late 30s and while he did have some medical issues, there was nothing that would have predicted a young and untimely death. Naturally his family was devastated.

A memorial was held and as is typically done, a photo slideshow was hastily put together and shown, along with poems, readings and other memorial elements our culture historically does when memorializing someone.

Not long…

What would it look like if you had a computer with every single memory stored on it forever? You would be able to access every webpage you’ve ever looked at, every email you’ve read, every photo you’ve taken or been in, videos of your public speeches, records of conversations. Everything that you felt was important or not important stored away for you to review or others to find out about you.

Back in the late 1990′s Gordon Bell decided, like many of us, to start scanning and…

A couple of weeks ago my husband and I went to visit our friends in New Braunfels, a town near San Antonio, Texas. The next town over, Gruene, (pronounced, for some unexplainable reason, as Green) is a well-known tourist spot and home to Gruene Hall, built in 1878 and the oldest continually running dance hall in Texas. Many famous musicians have made their start at Gruene Hall and often come back frequently to relax and entertain.

The night we were there, Jerry Jeff Walker was in the…

This article, in an edited format, was written for the Houston Business Journal and ran in it’s “Best Places to Work” issue in July of 2008. I am sharing this as I never posted it to my blog when it originally written.”

Employee acknowledgment is one of the best tools a company can use for creating a work environment that fosters loyalty and stimulates high achievement. Put simply, people appreciate and respond to recognition. They are motivated by praise, which validates and…

This past weekend was Mother’s Day. I had a lovely day with my oldest son and husband. We had lunch and went to see The Hunger Games which I enjoyed. My favorite thing to do is watch movies so if you’re wanting to do something special for me, take me to a movie, pretty much any movie, and I will be happy.

Lots of my friends were posting messages on Facebook and Twitter about Mother’s Day. Some were photos and little tributes to their own mothers while some were photos of them spending…

Note: This article was originally published in January 2008:

This past week I had the privilege of seeing Muhammad Yunus speak at a World Affairs Council of Houston luncheon. Yunus, of Bangladesh, is a 2006 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and a 1999 recipient of the Indira Gandhi prize for peace, disarmament and development in India.

In the late 1970′s, he started Grameen Bank (“Bank of Villages”, in Bangla) to address the…

“What’s the real story?” “How do you get the skeletons out of the closet?” “I want to know all the dirt.” I’ve had several discussions over the past few weeks on this topic and I think this is something important to weigh in on.

I view myself as a video biographer. My job is to tell a visual story. My client is usually the subject, the children of the subject(s), or someone who has hired me to tribute the subject. There is a story there, and my first job is to figure out what it is,…

Dan Curtis, my friend and fellow Personal Historian in Victoria, BC, recently penned this excellent blog posting on determining the costs of a personal history. This article tackles head-on, the perceived discrepancies of pricing when shopping for a historian. From the buyer’s point of view, it can often be difficult shopping for this service as in their mind, they’re just looking for a tribute, and may not appreciate the vast range of options available today. Dan has attempted to provide…

Since October is Family History Month, I was already thinking about this subject for a new blog article when a Canadian writer and film producer named Robb Lucy asked that I make a contribution to his new book. Scheduled for publication in the Spring of 2009, it is tentatively titled “Legacies aren’t for dead people – It’s about creating and really enjoying yours… now!”

Robb wanted to get additional perspectives on this specialized form of storytelling from other professional…

It’s human nature to want to memorialize someone who has recently died. We want people to know who they were by allowing friends and family to come together and provide thoughts, insights and memories of the departed. Online, this is big business. This is because it can be shared all over the world and provides a platform that everyone can access, at any time.Here is my list of some of the top online memorial websites and obituary tribute websites. They are not ranked in any order of…

Part 3 of a series about capturing the joy of family events on video

Last week we covered the first of four phases used in creating multimedia productions to capture the joy of family events – concepting / scriptwriting. This week, I we will talk about phase two – pre-production and planning.

As Hal Landen puts it in his book…

Who are we? Besides living organisms, we are a story, the details (sub-stories) are connected to other people’s stories and they are part of community stories, family stories, national stories…. you get where I’m going here.

I have always seen life from the perspective that there are the facts of what happened, and what we make those facts mean. The sum of those two things are our stories. They make up who we are, how we see the world, how others come to know us, and what we think of…

I have been working on what I refer to as a long-format video biography. My client has hired me for a year to develop a personal history as well as to film significant events during the year. We’ve been doing this since November 2011 and so far we’ve shot four different events. A couple of the events, we’ve turned into short individual videos to send out to people who attended while other footage is waiting to fit into its bigger scope.

Sunday I was at my client’s Super Bowl party,…

One of my blog readers recently wrote asking me about the best way to share photos with family members who are far away. She was interested in having family members help her identify people in her photos but was hesitant to put the photos in the mail, fearing they may not be returned. This is a pretty important thing to be fearful of and many of my clients have reported losing photos to well-meaning family members. My grandmother was notorious in our family for coming over while we were out…