These are our stories

After a fitful few hours of sleep, yesterday I awoke to a day with no Dawn. The day before, she died. Most unexpectedly. Age 59. Dawn and...

One hundred years ago this summer, Frank and Anna (Schroeder) Rasche welcomed son Ernest into the world. Forty-three years and some month...

For as long as I can remember, I knew that I once had an uncle Roman. For just as long, I knew that he died as a teenager when he was cli...

"History isn't usually told by the bigwigs of the era, even if they are some of its main characters. Instead, it is often reconstructed f...

Three weeks ago, I led a Life Stories session at the history center of an adjacent county. It was our sixth of eight sessions, the time I...

At the end of our lives, we become only memories. If we're lucky, someone is passing those down. — Plum Johnson, "They Left Us Everything"

I spent Monday afternoons this past fall leading Life Stories classes for religious sisters in a nearby town. Three of the sisters in the...

I do book folding. Despite the name, it’s actually the pages of books that get folded. I fold old books — one page at a time, two folds p...

One of my first Life Stories clients, Mary, died last month. She was 94. Her father had been a sharecropper in Kentucky, and soon after I...

Alice and Edwin participated in my most recent Life Stories class. Alice had a career as a beautician. In her beauty shop, she had a Coke...

Six weeks before Judy was born, her father died in a car accident. So Judy and her mother moved in with her mother’s parents, Judy’s gran...

His days of making and flying kites with the neighborhood boys took place more than 70 years ago, but to hear Paul describe it during a g...

"Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity there is no par...

This past Saturday I ran into a client whose life stories I completed writing early last year. Bernice, who became a widow during the tim...

Mary was 7 when her mother died. Don was 8 when his died. Wilma was 12. Katharine was 17 when her mom died of lung cancer and leukemia an...

Lou died last week. I am still in disbelief. After I wrote about her in a blog on Oct. 16 and linked it to my Facebook page, she commente...

In February, a woman from a neighboring town learned about my Life Stories classes and immediately expressed a strong interest in taking ...

I am gearing up for fall Life Stories classes. This means I have times and locations set, and now I go through my list of prospective par...

“Your heartache is someone else’s hope. If you make it through, somebody else is going to make it through. Tell your story.” — Kim McManu...

In early spring I committed to working on writing the life stories of an 89-year-old Indianapolis man. His relatives who were hiring m...