Oral and Written Histories

The Powder River County Extension office is sponsoring a workshop on obtaining oral histories and I’m excited about attending next week. The workshop is an outgrowth of a statewide project to assist communities record  stories and the presenter is Paul Lachapelle, Extension Specialist at MSU Community Development.

The StoryCorps archive is the largest digital collection of human voices and are stored   in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. for future generations. The extension office shares guidelines to simplify recording oral histories and explain the digital recording and sharing process.

Similarly, Montana’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation Districts has undertaken a project to record oral histories of ag women, a critical component of Montana’s heritage that we lose daily. I kept hearing radio ads about the project and told my mom that she needed to tell her story – after the training, maybe I’ll be able to record her story!

The contact for the oral history project is Linda Brander at LLbrander@mt.gov. and as stated on the DNRC website, “Once an oral history is completed, it will go into the oral history collection at the Montana Historical Society (at https://mhs.mt.gov/) and be placed on the DNRC website.   This will allow people from all over the world to read the histories.”