Life Story Professionals, also called Personal Historians, are creative professionals who help both celebrities and “ordinary people” tell their life stories. An Life Story Professional may be engaged to help individuals, families, communities, or organizations preserve memories, images, voices, stories, and histories — often, but not always, in narrative form.
Personal histories can be told in many ways and published in many formats. Various print and multimedia formats can help bring your stories and images to life.
Audio File or CD: The sound of your voice actually telling your stories is a gift for future generations to cherish. Recording your stories on audio allows your children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to hear you telling your tales with your own unique expressions. Personal historians record your stories on top-quality equipment.
Hardcover or Softcover Books: Besides enjoying curling up with your own book, you can share it with your family and friends. Whether you want a transcript of a recorded interview, a book that is straight narrative, or one that combines your well-developed stories with photographs, documents and other illustrations, a Life Story Professional can work with you to produce your heirloom volume.
Photo Books: Some people are more visual in their orientation and may want to create a personal history that is primarily images — photos or drawings — with little or no text. In that case, a Life Story Professional with this expertise can help organize and format the material. The final product could be a beautifully bound photo book/scrapbook on archival paper or a poster-sized collage assembling events from your life.
Slideshows: Slideshows are a unique way to celebrate an occasion using your old photos, films, and videotapes. Life Story Professionals with this expertise assemble photos of you at various stages of your life as well as old home movies, slides, and other memorabilia to create an animated presentation set to music. Slideshow videos are often created to celebrate weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, bar and bat mitzvahs, for memorial services, and other important family events.
Video CD/DVD with Audio: Tell it your way, alive and in person on digital video. Professional interviewers can put you at ease as technicians record your words, expressions, gestures and appearance, capturing your spirit and personality for posterity. Video personal histories and custom DVDs come in many forms, from interviews with one person to many; from simple to complex; from short tributes to TV-style biographies. Whatever form you choose, you’ll feel like the star of your own documentary.
Family Website: Create your own family website to preserve and share family stories and information. Family websites can contain the family tree, genealogy data, photos, letters, and stories using text, video clips, sound, and images.
Art Books, Scrapbooks, and Hand-Made Books: Some Life Story Professionals combine their talents as artist and designer with their writing and organizing skills to deliver a lovely, one-of-a-kind product. Often, handmade books combine text with photographs, drawings, scraps of fabric, pressed flowers, jewelry, or your favorite mementos. The final product is a work of art created just for you.
Unique Formats: Can you imagine a special quilt whose pieces, fabrics, and decorations tell your story? How about a book made of bits of dresses your mother wore? Perhaps there are beautiful images and music that have inspired you or a painting, drawing, mural or collage that could illustrate your life. Life Story Professionals can help you with any project you can dream up to express the stories and themes of your life.