Have you ever thought you’d love to interview a member of your family about their life? In this episode, personal biographer Francie King shares tips on how to get individuals to talk and the importance of listening as you record. As a former journalist she knows how to refine a story and gather the facts. We chat about ghost writing, the process of putting it all together and the power of hearing our relatives voices. She’s a master at the art of gently encouraging individuals to share their past.
I love her passion for the topic as expressed in this quote “Personal history and biography,” she says, “are always larger than a single
finished book. The story of an individual, or a family, is the story of us, part
of our shared history, always worth preserving, always deeply valuable for
the next generations. Whenever that history remains untold, then it is lost to
us forever.”
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About My Guest:
Francie King has worked for more than 40 years as a journalist, writer, and
editor, and as a director of nonprofit publications strategic planning and
management. Her workplaces include more than a half dozen major
universities and colleges in New England, as well as the Museum of Fine
Arts and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. She fell in love with
personal biography and memoir around 2007 while editing a book about her
father, a world-renowned nuclear physicist. In 2009, after finding inspiration
in a community of supportive, like-minded writers, she turned her longtime
writing consultancy into a memoir and personal/family biography business,
HistoryKeep, based in Marblehead, Massachusetts.
Building on a love of biography and family stories and with long experience
as an interviewer, Francie has written or edited more than 20 bespoke books,
and often teams with other personal historians as a developmental and copy
editor. She works with graphic designers, proofreaders, and printers to create
a book suitable for the coffee table or for sharing around the dinner table
among family and friends. Several of her books are now available on
Amazon.
About Maureen Taylor:
Maureen is a frequent keynote speaker on photo identification, photograph preservation, and family history at historical and genealogical societies, museums, conferences, libraries, and other organizations across the U.S., London and Canada. She’s the author of several books and hundreds of articles and her television appearances include The View and The Today Show (where she researched and presented a complete family tree for host Meredith Vieira). She’s been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, The Boston Globe, M
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