Oral History

What is Oral History?
Oral history is the recording of people's memories, experiences and opinions. It is:

  • A living history of everyone's unique life experiences
  • An opportunity for those people who have been 'hidden from history' to have their voice heard
  • A rare chance to talk about and record history face-to-face
  • A source of new insights and perspectives that may challenge our view of the past.1

Oral history provides such a rich insight to our history, the people, the places, the memories, experiences and emotions of the past.
People provide the link to past memories as part of their living history.
Documented records give us only a highly selected, edited, literal and biased representation of our history, but what people remember, experience and relate provides such a wider, deeper and more nuanced picture of the life of our place and community.

Oral history includes collecting the memories of people as they grew up, their family life, their social circle, their school time, friendships, influences in the community and beyond, how they lived : food, clothes, houses, relationships. Their recollections provide the colour of life, the voice, the language, and the tone of the memories that no documents can give.

There are criticisms of recordings that these are personal interpretations, one version of the past, and memories are fallible and inaccurate. These emotional experiences are so valuable in conjunction with the documentation of the past events.
Documentation can be

From the very beginning of the All Our Stories, Dualchas Agus Duthchas, project it became clear that collecting our Oral History was something we all thought important.
We had a workshop to learn some of the skills we need, and we made a couple of recordings. We have a couple of small digital recorders, and are getting to learn about the software to process them.
As time has moved on

This is definitely something that would be really good to do more of, and if you are interested please contact us
It would be really fun to have a small working group continuing to collect recordings from our fascinating community.

Questions to ask when you are talking to your own relatives - most of us have a voice recorder on our phones or tablet these days

Here are some other projects to give us inspiration
Mallaig Oral History Project
Jura Lives

Oral History Society
Oral history Projects around the UK
other Oral history links

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