INTRODUCTION
There was a time when a great many people knew their family history going back hundreds of years. This history defined who they were and what their role and responsibility was - both within the family and as a member of the larger community. If you were a carpenter, chances are, so to was your father, grandfather and so forth. There was also the tradition of passing on an oral history; true, this may have been more oriented towards the group as a whole rather than the individual but that would have been put into perspective within the family. There were both good and bad aspects to that situation and it cannot be denied that in giving those traditions up, the life of the individual became freer, much more flexible and, more often than not, “better”. Your father might have been a carpenter - you could be the President.
But in throwing out the restrictions imposed in those days gone by, we’ve also lost our sense of personal history; who we are in the larger scheme of things; our view of our role in and responsibility towards the larger community. These have been replaced with the rise and fall of fads defined by strangers; with the legal and societal definitions of “political correctness”; the moral standards of shifting trends in entertainment or the latest concerns of one religious group or another.
We need that sense of continuity that comes from family tradition; that solid feeling of being firmly rooted in who we are - while not giving up the freedom to make our own life decisions! This essay summarizes an approach which could be used to create a possible software product, called (for the sake of discussion) “A Living Legacy”.
The purpose would be to assist people in documenting their stories by utilizing the tools of our age. It can only be hoped that it, or something like it, will enable a growing number of people to lay the foundation for a return to the best sense of passing on a personal and family history. This will be of immense benefit to individuals, their families and, like a pebble tossed into that proverbial pool of water, to the larger society.
There have been and are a wealth of both print and computer based software guides to writing biographies. For the most part they share a common approach: confront the user with hundreds of “questions” intended to stimulate their memories. Each question is followed by what appears to many as “acres” of blank space. The idea of filling it in often seems overwhelming. That’s it; questions and blank space.
THE PRODUCT
“A Living Legacy” would be a computer based interactive interviewing process to help people tell the story of their lives. It is a solution to simplifying the process of recording their experiences, the lessons learned from those experiences, opinions formed, values developed, advice to share and traditions that should continue to be followed.
At the start of the process, the user will complete a survey covering their basic vital statistics and preferences for how much assistance they will want to complete their biography. (This will follow an introductory guide outlining the options.) This profile will determine the path they will take and what they will encounter along the way.
At the basic level will be the questions, the answers to which can take the form of multiple choice, ratable scales, preference lists or free form. In free form sections, an audio input option (MP3 format) will be available for two purposes; some people are not comfortable with the keyboard and in certain cases a voice recording will be a better means for communicating to the future. (Automated transcription may be an option at some point.)
The user would only see one question at a time. Every follow-up question would consistently flow from the answer to the previous question. In other words, if you express a preference for jazz, the following question won’t be something about rock and roll!
The process will be designed in sections dealing with the various aspects of a person’s life. At the end of each section, the software will automatically generate a narrative summary that the user will be able to edit from the word level on through to the total essay. Context sensitive “Help” will be available to guide the person through this process as well.
There will also be internal checks to keep them on track so that if, for example, they had, as noted above, answered “jazz” as their favorite music in one place but said the Beatles were their favorite musicians somewhere else, a “pop-up” would appear to clarify the matter.
“Hot-links” to other web based resources will be provided to check dates, clarify a quote, find that book title; etc. - a range of options designed to make this process as painless as possible.
While it is true that, sometimes, a story is just that - a story; there will be an emphasis on eliciting the "meaning", i.e, the life lessons, learned from the experiences; the reason a particular opinion was formed; the impact of events; i.e.; not just the what, where and who of things but the why as well. In this way the process can also be viewed as a path towards self-discovery as much as a passing on of life-lessons to the next generations.
Speaking of life lessons, a major feature of the “Legacy” should be built-in querying capabilities geared towards future readers . Those future generations should not be limited to simply reading a story; they should be able to ask questions! The goal is to allow those people who have been authorized by the creator of the legacy to explore the result by using key words, ideas, dates, names, places, etc. What they discover could be anything from a brief answer, a short essay or even an audio/video presentation – depending on how the package was used to create the biography.
Granted, the querying capabilities of such a product would be the most complicated part of this project to program and might not even be there in a format more complicated than what we find in the standard “Help” indexes of most software packages – at the start. The goal for improvement should be an important part of the mission plan.
IMPACT
The Legacy will allow people to become the “Ancestor” who started the tradition of passing on a rich resource of information, ideas, values, experiences, lessons learned and advice hard come by for their Family. They will use their personal experiences and stories of just what it meant to live their life as the starting point. But that will just be the start as their children’s children will continue to enrich their lives and the Family’s History by continuing what is sure to become a compelling Tradition.
The overall mission of this project is to bring back the oral history traditions that pre-date civilization with the assistance of 21st century technology. Users should be encouraged to gather the stories and opinions of family and friends (forms should be provided which can be printed or e-mailed to others) as these relate to the history of each user.
Completing a “Legacy” will be more than a “trip down memory lane” for the process is sure to produce many revelations for its writer that will make this exploration a voyage of self-discovery.
The programming techniques required to create “A Living Legacy” have been used in expert system development and database software for some time. It will be necessary to create a series of templates for the various types of questions that can be selected and applied in the content development phase. To the ultimate user, it is not the “man behind the curtain” (the programming) that will grab the attention, it will be the “flash” and flow of the execution that will command it.
Content development will be the most demanding aspect and it is anticipated that a number of writers will be recruited as required for particular sections.
Security issues are not unique to this product but diligence will be required in applying the most advanced and innovative techniques. One possible option could, for example, be a sort of “double-blind” where the user pays for the service to a third party and is assigned a preliminary password. Once signed on at “Legacy”, they would change that password so that neither the original third party or us would have any way of knowing the identity of a particular user. That password would also be linked to a randomly selected encryption method with the user having the only key. (If the user “forgets” any of this, we would also not be able to help them out but that is one price for the privacy.)
SUMMARY
There once was a television show which included the tag line: “.... There are a million stories in the Naked City.” In reality there are many more than that just in this country, not to leave out the global perspective. But, for the most part, we’ve lost the tradition of developing and passing on personal and family histories. What stories do get told rarely survive beyond two generations. This is a great loss to our understanding of who we are as individuals and as the continuation of a family far greater than the most current generation. Losing sight of being one part of a continuing story also affects the larger community in the sense that the view of our role in and responsibility towards that community is diminished.
Consider the plight of many adopted people and their very real need to know who their birth parents were in order to “know” who they are. That connection means far more than a set of birth parents. Through them, the adopted loses their spiritual isolation and becomes a part of that greatly expanded and continuing family story.
The current generation is but the tip of a very deep pyramid that most of us will never penetrate. But, with “A Living Legacy”, we can begin to lay a new, more accessible, foundation - which is why this product was conceived.
From a personal perspective, people have been telling me for years that I should “write a book” and I know how difficult and time consuming that would be. I also spent years trying to convince my father that he should write his story (or at least record it on tape). He never did and so those “stories” and their meanings are lost – except to the extent that I pass them on - a secondhand result at best. I’ve known many other people who have expressed these same frustrations. I know that if the story-telling process can be made relatively “painless”, the result will be a wealth of rescued history. The results will be meaningful not just for the immediate families of those who get involved but for generations to come.
FUTURE INNOVATIONS
Using the internet, it will be possible to develop a sense of community involvement through the use of site-based bulletin boards and chat rooms. People could be invited to post their results, in part or entirely, to a special section that could be used as additional real world examples by others.
It may even be possible to donate their histories to a facility that would use them as the basis of an on-going social research project.
There will also be planned special events - such as “A Day in the Life of America”: with text and photo entries. The overall results will be parsed and made key word searchable or users will be able to randomly take a “tour”. (Something similar has been published in the print world but would be much more energetic on the Web.)
Adapting the package to other cultures and languages will also be accomplished. The Pacific Rim cultures, where a strong sense of ancestor worship already exists, will be an especially vigorous market.
