NEWSLETTER
For my project, I interviewed my maternal grandmother about her life. Through these interviews I was able to create a book full of stories, pictures, and even her most famous recipe. The process of creating the book began with interviewing her about her life. I scheduled two “appointments” with her to interview her. I contacted her beforehand about these interviews so she wouldn’t feel blind-sided by them. When I arrived for the interviews, she was ready and prepared to talk about her life. These interviews took about an hour each and though I provided some questions, a lot of the stories came from her as she was just talking. Because of this I was able to allow her to share her life with me, instead of making the questions cater to what I wanted to learn about.
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After the interview, I went and transcribed the interviews. This process took a significant amount of time. After the transcription, I picked an online book designer program that would allow me to create a scrapbook. Through this program I was able to design individual pages and place photographs in there according to the outline I created for the book. The book was designed into major sections, such as growing up, raising kids, etc. I made sure to include a lot of pictures that had been collected earlier in the interviews. The process of designing each page and and inputting the text and pictures took a significant amount of time as well. Then, after each page had been proofread and formatted, the book was printed.
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The inspiration for this project came from my paternal grandmother. She had a rather unique life-story, but no one ever recorded her stories. After she passed away, those stories were lost forever. As I have gotten older, I’ve wanted to learn more about my grandmother, but I can only do so through my father and mother, and even then their knowledge of her life is limited. As my maternal grandmother has aged, I’ve realized that this would happen as well unless someone recorded her stories. So, I chose to create this book as my EDGE project.
This project had some challenges, but most of these were related to the process of creating the book. Most of the pictures were pretty old, so the quality wasn’t at high as I would have hoped. In addition to this, there weren’t a lot of pictures that my grandmother had, so I struggled to find some pictures for certain events. The biggest challenge I encountered was not having enough time to do more interviews. When I began the process I thought that we would be able to do two interviews and I would be able to compile a book that covered most of her life. But in the two hours I interviewed her, we barely covered her childhood. Because of this, the book focused mostly on her childhood and growing-up years and not on her whole life, which was challenging. I will be doing additional interviews and adding to the book later.
This project will benefit my siblings and the rest of my family. Because it is a physical book, they will be able to read it and it can be used as a record of her life, so the stories won’t be lost.
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The project benefitted me by allowing me to learn more about my grandmother. When I began this process, I didn’t think that my grandmother and I had very much in common. Through the process of interviewing her, I realized that we actually have a lot in common. I also learned that my grandmother was a little bit of a rebel, which was surprising. I had always seen her as my grandmother, and I felt like I was better able to relate to her as I learned more about her just being a kid and teenager, just like I had been.
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