Jeanne Archer and her son, Andy, are professional personal historians — storytellers who help people condense their lives into stories. The result is a bound memoir designed for a deliberately narrow audience of relatives and friends. Jeanne Archer, a former marketing director, freelance writer and a past president of the Association of Personal Historians, is a Greenwood Village writer who contributed to “My Words Are Gonna Linger,” a new anthology of personal history accounts. — Claire Martin, The Denver Post
Q: The personal historian career seems relatively new. Is it?
A: Yes, although exploring for roots — where did I come from, and what are my stories? — is timeless. Baby boomers are realizing that their parents won’t be around forever, and there’s a sense that they need to save their parents’ stories.
Q: What is it about this period in time that lends such urgency?
A: It’s no longer common for children to get educated and remain in the towns where they grew up, and stories passed from generation to generation. Now people live in different towns, different states, different countries. It’s important to capture the stories that used to be told over the kitchen table. Or, in the early days of mankind, told around the campfire. Conversation and storytelling are the things that bring us together.
Q: How do you elicit those stories from your clients?
A: By listening. And asking questions. People need to tell their stories. People are so hungry to have someone really listen to them, and focus on them. It doesn’t matter if they’re 20 years old, or 80. People come alive when someone pays attention to their stories.
Q: What impact does such concentrated listening have on you, as the listener?
A: It makes me appreciate the moment more. It makes me break out of my own worries, and stop and appreciate the moment we are living in. When you listen to people in their 80s and 90s talk about their lives, you realize things go by pretty quickly.
Q: How did you get interested in being a personal historian?
A: When I was 15, I recorded my grandfather’s story, and shortly after the interview, he had a heart attack and died. So that is the only existing record of his voice. To have the voice and the stories of the people important to you means that you still have them close by, even when they’re gone. Genealogy is important, but there are impressive stories between every date of birth and date of death. You can uncover some surprises.
Q: Good surprises, or unwelcome surprises?
A: Both. Sometimes people talk about something they don’t want to include in their final personal history book. One woman, afterward, stood up with a deep sigh, looked at the sky and said, “That was a catharsis!”
Q: Do people ever say they’ve run out of things to talk about?
A: A friend told me she once wrote a list of questions for her mother. They talk about those in conversations now. Sometimes she asks her mother why she never heard that story before. And her mother says, “You never asked.” So ask! And then sit back and listen. Don’t argue. We all have different versions of the same events. Just listen.
