Isn’t It time You Recorded Your Family’s History?
I've spent decades as an oral historian and public historian, and this summer I'm teaching Exploring Your Family History through Oral History — a six-week online course through Duke's Center for Documentary Studies beginning July 7. If you've been meaning to record your mother's stories, or your grandfather's, or sit down with the aunt who holds the family recipes along with its history, this course was designed for you. And if you've been meaning to do it for years and somehow haven't gotten around to it yet — that's exactly why you need this class.
The barrier to starting a family oral history project is almost never ability or passion. People who want to do this work are usually perfectly capable of doing it. They have the curiosity. They have the relationships. They often even have the equipment — a phone with a Voice Memo app is sitting right in their pocket.
The barrier is structure. And time. And the very human tendency to assume that later will happen. Somehow we imagine that in some future moement, things will slow down and we’ll be less busy so that we can find a stretch of time to finally sit your grandmother down and ask her the questions you've been carrying for years. “I’ll get to it,” we tell ourselves, “later.”
Later, in my experience, does not happen on its own.
Why the cobbler’s kids have no shoes
Even with decades of oral history experience, I never interviewed my own family members until relatively recently, for the same reason that there’s an old cliché about how the cobbler’s kids go barefoot. It’s because it's easier to feel urgency about someone else's story than about the ones closest to you. You can recognize immediately why it matters to interview an 80-year-old veteran or a community elder in their 90s whose memories are irreplaceable. But your own mother? Your grandfather? Somehow that feels less urgent — even when, on some level, you it isn't. The people we love most are the ones we assume will always be there, and so we always assume that we’ll have time some day to have those conversations.
Further complicating the push to get started is that interviewing family is genuinely harder than interviewing a stranger. The pre-existing relationship brings warmth and trust, but it also brings a history, and along with it the sometimes-complicated dynamics between parents and children, between siblings, and so on.
A structured course with a clear assignment cuts through all of that. It gives you a purpose for your interview, a deadline for getting it started, and a clear reason to finally make the call not later, but now.
What you'll walk away with
By the end of six weeks, you'll understand the ethics and best practices of oral history, have practiced your interviewing technique in a supportive environment, know what you need to know about equipment and audio quality, and have a solid plan for a family oral history project. More importantly, you'll have one interview already finished.
That last part matters more than it might sound. One interview is contagious. Like potato chips, you can't have just one. And with one completed interview, you'll have something real to share with your family. That first interview is proof positive that this project is happening, that the stories are really being captured, and that you are really doing this. That energy tends to generate more interviews, more stories, and more people who want to be part of what you're building.
If you might be imagining family history as source material for a podcast this course will give you the foundation you need. Your distant cousins may never sit down and listen to 6 or 8 sixty-to ninety-minute recordings. But they might listen to a curated series of podcast episodes on their commute, and enjoy learning about your family's story in a beautifully rendered way. The raw material and the skills to shape it start here.
The details
Exploring Your Family History through Oral History runs for six Tuesday evenings beginning July 7, 2026, entirely online — which means you can do it from anywhere. (The last course I participated in through CDS had participants from all over the U.S. and from other countries!) Whether you're in the Triangle area of central NC or halfway around the world, you're welcome.
For those who are interested in a broader foundation in documentary studies, this course counts toward CDS’s continuing education certificate.
Registration is open now, with a July 6 deadline. Full course details and registration link are here.
Later is not coming. July is. I look forward to seeing you in class!
