How To Create A Video Family History

The Complete Guide to Interviewing and Taping Your Family's Stories & Memories
by Rob & Laura Huberman
14.95, Cover: Paperback, ISBN: 0-9674074-4-3, ©2003

The holiday season is quickly approaching -- times when families traditionally gather together and celebrate Thanksgiving, Hannukah, Christmas and New Years. It's also a perfect time to plan to ask parents and grandparents about their lives and to record a "video family history." Capturing family stories and preserving memories on tape to pass on to future generations has never been easier, thanks to a new book, How to Create a Video Family History: The Complete Guide to Interviewing and Taping Your Family's Stories and Memories by Rob & Laura Huberman.

Emphasizing techniques that can be utilized by any camcorder owner, the guide demonstrates how to compile video taped family histories that can be treasured for years to come -- and with minimal technical skill. In a simplified question and answer approach to videotaping and conducting a family history interview, Video Family History provides extensive sample interview questions on a wide variety of family subjects that can help loosen up even the "camera shy" and offers video recording tips to insure professional-looking results.

With over 140 additional "holiday questions" the whole family can even have a chance to be on tape -- for posterity -- by answering questions such as: "What do you enjoy most about this holiday?" "What are you most thankful for in your life?"”What is you favorite childhood holiday memory?”

The authors became interested in family history in 1986 and began taping individuals and organizations in the Washington, D.C. area. “I realized we could enable individuals to conduct their own video family history interviews by offering all of our techniques, ideas and interview questions in an easy-to-use guide,” says Rob. The result was the couple’s first book, Video Family Portraits: The User-friendly Guide to Videotaping Your Family History, Stories and Memories (1987, Heritage Books).

Video Family History is a completely updated and expanded follow-up to their well received first title. (See "Reviews")

“One never realizes how valuable these tapes will become until the opportunity to record them no longer exists,” notes Laura, whose father passed away battling cancer for three years after his family history had been recorded. “When my mother, brother and myself again watched the tape years later, we were amazed (and thrilled) to see him -- vibrant, animated, and telling stories we had completely forgotten. Now my children can watch that tape and can get ‘know’ their grandfather as they see, hear him and ‘spend time’ with him.”

The authors have also recorded the histories of “celebrities” such as Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers; Bluma Bayuk, 97, artist, author and oldest surviving descendent of the original Alliance Jewish farming community in southern New Jersey; Princess Pale Moon, founder of the American Indian Heritage Foundation in Falls Church, VA; and “Grandma” Pouyama, a 103-year-old Hopi Indian, interviewed by her granddaughter in their native Hopi language during the St Louis Indian Days Pow Wow.

Sales of camcorders surpassed 6.3 million in 2001, pushing household penetration above 40 percent, according to HDTV News Online. With that many camcorder owners combined with a large, aging population, more families than ever can now discover their "family treasures" and create a family heirloom to be shared time and again. Additionally, both serious and amateur genealogists, who comprise the 3rd most popular hobby behind stamp and coin collecting, can now utilize video as an important tool in helping them preserve their oral history along with the real images of their family heritage. “This is so much better than silent, old home movies were,” says Rob.