Tools for Recording Life Stories

Recently Olive Tree Genealogy received this email from a reader. It's a great question for discussion!

This month my neighbor and I and one more friend are starting a genealogy club at the assisted living center in our town. We thought that we would begin by having each member of our club tell their personal story as we record it. I bought two digital recorders today but my sister suggested that we use Dragon Dictate. Would anyone have an opinion on this for me?

Recording and preserving life stories and memories is a wonderful idea. I think the digital recorders will work well but the group might also consider using a Smart Pen. With a Smart Pen you make jot notes in a special notebook.

The Pen not only records the person talking, but your jot notes allow you to touch a word on the paper and you get immediate playback. Later you simply plug your pen into your computer and transfer the recorded story or stories to your hard drive.

It's an amazing piece of technology and great for interviews as it is less intimidating than a recorder. I've written about using the Smart Pen if you care to read the articles:

Echo Smart Pen: Handy Tool for Genealogists

Capturing Memories Told By My 88 Year Old Aunt

 I'm not sure that Dragon Dictation would work well as it types as you speak.  It's a voice recognition program which is different from digital recorders. It requires editing the written text too. As well Dragon Dictation requires that you "speak" the punctuation you wish to insert. So if someone is speaking and you are using Dragon to record that person it will be a run on sentence with no punctuation.

Let's have my readers weigh in with their ideas and suggestions - what do you use?

Capturing Memories Told By My 88 Year Old Aunt

Eileen September 1941

This is a portrait of my Aunt Eileen in 1941. She was 18 years old and performing tap dances with a group of minstrels.

Yesterday I had a nice long visit with her in her apartment. I encouraged her to tell me stories of her childhood and about my grandparents, my mother (her sister), and my great-grandparents.

Auntie "I" as we call her, has a fabulous memory and knowing from past visits that she would talk faster than I could write, this time I was prepared. I took my Echo Smart Pen with me.

With the Smart Pen I was able to make jot notes (point form) as my aunt shared her wonderful stories. My Pen recorded her words so all I had to do was make the occasional notation in my notebook.  It is easy to transfer the recorded audio to a computer to work with it.  I could even touch my pen to the brief notes I made and hear the recording at that point of the story.

In an hour I learned more than I'd ever known about my mom's family life as a young girl in Guelph Ontario. Why didn't anyone tell me that my Grandfather was an accomplished singer? That he sang in church choirs as well as performed in Vaudeville and Minstrel Shows? That he woke up singing and sang as he worked throughout the day? That every Saturday evening the whole family gathered around the player piano and sang songs so loudly that the neighbours would come and join them. My mom never mentioned a word about growing up in such a musical home. 

Auntie "I" tells stories and my Smart Pen records them

Auntie "I" had so many memories and stories they came tumbling out. I was thrilled! I heard about the Christmas her grandfather (my great-grandfather) had a little too much brandy on his rounds of St. Joseph's Hospital in Guelph. It seems that every Christmas he visited all children in the Hospital to dispense gifts.

The Nuns would give him a bit of brandy to warm him up before he made his way home, but one Christmas he got a bit tipsy and fell into a snowbank on his way home. Unable to get out he lay there giggling until my grandfather found him. What a great story! I love to be able to form a picture in my head of what was just a name and dates of an ancestor. Now great-grandpa is a real person to me.

I spent several hours happily listening to Auntie "I"'s stories and she enjoyed telling them. I can hardly wait to go back and hear more. 

When I got home I transferred the recording of Auntie "I" to my computer and now I have the fun of transcribing her words. If you want to record family memories you can buy the Livescribe 8 GB Echo Smartpen  from Amazon.com

I See a Dragon in My Future!

Dragon Dictation is a free voice recognition application for the iPad (also for the Iphone or Ipod Touch). I'm using it to write this blog post. I'm not typing this, Dragon is typing it for me. How cool is that? It's very easy to use and within seconds of downloading it on to my Ipad I was dictating an email.

I'm thinking about different genealogical uses for Dragon. I'm going to be attending the RootsTech conference in February (I'm an official Rootstech Blogger) and it seems to me that I can continue to write my daily blog posts using Dragon and that it will be much easier and faster for me then using my iPad keyboard.


Dragon allows me to speak punctuation commands such as "period" or "new paragraph". This lets me format my writing exactly as I want it. That's the part I'm having trouble getting used to but I assume it gets easier the more you use Dragon.

By dictating this blog post into Notes in Dragon I am able to pause and then resume where I left off. When I am finished my blog post I plan to correct any typos or errors and e-mail the post to myself. I could e-mail it directly to blogger to be automatically published on my Olive Tree Genealogy blog but this time I prefer to e-mail it to myself and copy and paste it into Blogger.

I experimented with Dragon last night by sending tweets to my Twitter but it seemed a little strange to be speaking to my Ipad in front of my husband!

And so this ends my first blog post typed entirely by Dragon as I spoke into the microphone on my IPad. I'm liking it and believe I can find many other uses for it in my Genealogy world.