Home > Just for Kids > Oral History > Books You May Find Helpful

• Alessi, Jean, and Jan Miller. Once Upon a Memory: Your Family Tales and Treasures. (White Hall, VA: Betterway Publications, 1987) A great book for offering suggestions about how to do an oral history, what questions to ask, and how to organize and preserve your results. This is a very readable book.
• Banks, Ann. First Person America. (New York: Knopf Publishers, 1980) A wonderful book for middle school students and above on a variety of topics, from pioneering out west to running a medicine show at carnivals and fairs. The interviews were collected by writers working for the Federal Writers� Project of the WPA in the 1930s.
• Croom, Emily Anne. Unpuzzling Your Past: A Basic Guide to Genealogy. (Cincinnati, OH: Betterway Books, 1995) This book is a wonderful resource guide for a number of topics in doing family history research, but also has a thorough list of questions to ask when doing an oral history interview. See chapters 6 through 9. For older students, grades 7-12.
• Davis, Donald. Telling Your Own Stories. (Little Rock, AK; August House Publishers, 1993) Offers ideas for questions to ask in an oral history, or of yourself, and ideas how to tell a story well. (For grades 6-12).
• Hoopes, James. Oral History: An Introduction for Students. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1979) While written for older students (high school and college), this book has many helpful suggestions for how to run an interview, and a good discussion of why oral history is an important part of our historical record.
• KBYU Television and Brigham Young University. Ancestors Television Series Companion Teacher�s Guide. Activities centering on family history designed for grades 7-12. (Provo and Salt Lake City, UT: KBYU/Brigham Young University, 1996).
• Rosenbluth, Vera. Keeping Family Stories Alive: Discovering and Recording the Stories and Reflections of a Lifetime. 2nd edition (Point Roberts, WA: Hartley and Marks Publishers, 1997) A very good on the subject overall, though probably more for junior high or high school students or adults. Good chapters on all the steps involved in an oral history interview, from how to prepare the interviewee, to the kinds of questions to ask, to sample interviews, to doing oral history in the classroom. It contains a great bibliography.
• Taylor, Maureen. Through the Eyes of Your Ancestors: A Step-by-Step Guide to Uncovering Your Family�s History. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999) A great book for thinking about family history overall, and the questions you can ask your family members (or others) in an oral history. (For grades 5-12).
• Wiggington, Eliot. Foxfire (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1972) This book started as a magazine written by students in Rabun Gap, Georgia in 1966, and is based on their oral histories with older people in the community. The magazine became wildly popular, and the book version of Foxfire appeared in 1972, with several sequels published into the 1980s. A model project for doing oral history in the classroom.
• Wolfman, Ira. Do People Grow on Family Trees? Genealogy for Kids and Other Beginners. (New York: Workman Publishing, 1991) A wonderful book for grades 5-12. It has a section on interview questions, and suggestions for audio taping an interview.