elicitation tools

April Around the Corner

April brings the A to Z Writing / Blogging Challenge.

This year,in Apri, I will be posting 26 posts, one for each letter of the alphabet. The topic “Permission to Write” will be the theme to guide me through the 26 posts.

This grouping of posts will, I hope, give you permission to write about anything, and all things. These will be enabling permissions rather than constraining prompts. Sometimes, as 21st Century woman, I find so many other tasks, to dos, and ought to dos, that I do not prioritize my writing with great importance. I suspect I am not the only person to put my needs, especially when it comes to writing, far lower on my to do list than it deserves. Far lower than I deserve.

Women need access to other women’s thoughts, writings, knowledge, and wisdom. If we do not write these down, record them, and at least attempt to preserve them in some fashion, then we are ill-serving our daughters, nieces, and all future women to repeat mistakes we made and from which they will not be able learn.

I am sharing what I believe are carefully crafted elicitation tools. Prompts , in their simplest form, can poke you and produce an answer to a question. An elicitation tool, named and used by social scientists, walks with you down a path into a private memory garden filled with reference to images, emotions, and even scents that are connected to experiences from your life.

This is the difference between, “When was your grandmother born?” and “Tell me about the first memories you have of your grandmother’s kitchen, porch, or garden.”

We have to ask the right type of question if we want to tell a nuanced story.

The Central web page for the challenge can be found here. However, this site is older, insecure, http web protocol and and not the secure https protocol that all online readers should look for when opening or reading a site.

The listing of the participating sites can be found here in this google doc.

To participate in the A to Z Challenge, you will need to register here. Why? So you can read and draw inspiration from other participants’ writings.

Enjoy, think, write!

A Month is Just a Month… as Time Goes By

Autoethnography, How To Curate

I was looking for a hook to get me back into creating tools to help with creating legacy works. The month of August provided the necessary nudge.

August is a period of time that brings back fond memories, the flavors of summer, the sounds of my brothers’ laughing in the back yard at our August birthday gathering. Three of my four brothers were born in August.

Me, being the youngest kid by a large margin, I was almost ten years younger than the next youngest sibling, I was focused on desert at these gatherings. Three cakes! Each person with an August birthday could choose their favorite birthday cake and Mom would make it.

Jim wanted strawberry short cake. Warm Bisquick short bread, smothered with cold, juicy straw berries, and topped with heavy cream. Yum!

Max requested German Chocolate layer cake with coconut pecan icing. Delightful. And with a glass of milk, yum!

Roger (Trigger warning -this link is about Vietnam)was a chocoholic and had a real sweet tooth. His favorite cake was the most decadent cake I ever had until I was well into my adult years, and was served an even more decadent Lava Cake at an upscale restaurant was just a version of what Mom called Chocolate Upside-Down cake.

August was family and food, but it also had thunderstorms. As a kid I loved storms. I remember leaning on my second floor bedroom window sill with the little sliding screen fitted into the window I had just pushed up to accommodate the adjustable-width screen. The gusts of wind on top of a breeze cooled the muggy air. The churning blue black clouds rolled in from the west illuminated with flashes of lightening and carrying the scent of ozone and rain. The first huge drops of rain would hit the window and I felt like the world was glowing with portent. Storms provided one of the few unpredictable elements in my life. I loved them. Life on the farm was the same old samething day-in and day-out. Storms were the exception.

Bolts of lightning during a summer evening thunderstorm over a mid-western field.

August was also when my brother Max got married. That same August day was when my brother was nearly killed in Vietnam when a mortar hit and exploded just behind him as he was lifting another Marine into a Med-evac helicopter.

The school year usually began about three weeks into August. So shopping for school clothes was an August highlight.

I was cruising down memory lane remembering these things when I realized that month-focused writing prompts probably would get at information in ways that other prompts did not. The more I thought about it, the more I felt this was a good elicitation tool. So I began to create it. The image below is a promo for the Monthly Memories Worksheet that was the give away with this month’s newsletter.

Do not pout. I’m making this available to you too. Just click HERE. But it is only working as a print and fill out type download — my smart fillable PDF isn’t working.

Clever Gifts Of Storytelling Grandmas

Communication, Family, Featured Stories, How To, Review

I hope you will consider how the gifts you choose for grandchildren, nieces, and nephews build relationships and generate storytelling, sharing, and yes, even learning.

Updated for 2017
Originally posted October 22nd, 2015

Disclosure: Gabrielle Polt Balkan, author of The 50 States is my step-daughter. Other than parental pride per the atlas, and the Amazon Associates links, I received no compensation for any items in this review. All opinions are my own.

I suggest a set of gifts that include: an atlas, a board game, and a puzzle. Classic gifts. Tactile, interactive gifts are perfect for after meals and afternoons during family visits. And if you are clever about it, no one will ever know that these gifts were all frames for promoting legacy storytelling and sharing family history.
ATLAS
The 50 States: Explore the U.S.A with 50 fact-filled maps!
I would love this book even if it was not written by a kid whom I first took to many of the spots listed on the Arizona page of the Atlas, such as the Copper Queen in Bisbee, where we made her, as a teenager, stay in a room with her twerpy little sister.

the 50 States by Gabrielle Polt Balkan. This is the Arizona page that is loaded with fun facts and significant dates, people, and places that make the state come alive. — Arizona from The 50 States by Gabrielle Polt Balkan (author) and Sol Linero (illustrator.)

This freshly pressed atlas is so much more than a geography book. It is fun and interesting. Just look what honchos in the publishing industry say about it.

“A stylish atlas that evokes the character and diversity of the country, equally suitable for coffee tables or family vacations.” – Publisher’s Weekly

I totally agree with PW; it is a great edition for a Grandma’s coffee table.
Update: 50 Cities is now also available! As is The Book of Bones. Yes, both by Gabe, step-daughter extraordinaire.
The Book of Bones is not geographic, but you can talk about all the places you can find the bones or the animals that have the bones.

BOARD GAME
I was lucky enough to discover the the Binkele Family booth at the March 2015 Tucson Festival of Books with their Kickstarter-funded, Mensa award-winning game, Trekking the National Parks.

The Binkele Family at their booth where they are selling their Mensa award winning board game about trekking the national parks. — The Binkeles and Trekking… at their booth at the Tucson Festival of Books.

Trekking the National Parks is for ages 12 and up, but I suspect there are some younger folks who can handle the demands of the game. And of course pairing older and younger participants into two person teams allows younger kids to join in the game playing.
Why this puzzle, because it encourages talking about place. You know, the place where Grandma lives, the place where your mother was born, the places we went to on vacation when your mom was a kid. National parks are also a wonderful tool for learning geography. State capitals are okay, but parks and grizzly bear, geysers, and other park- associated animals and wonders provide memorable links for recalling places.
You may order directly from the family business site too.
Travel is a great subject for story-starting, so if you want a game for another age level or travel subject I recommend starting at this post on the Vamo blog that covers 24 travel-themed games.
PUZZLES
Plan on spending an evening browsing the jigsaw puzzles you will find on Amazon. For this trio of gifts, you can find a perfect for family fun for all ages with a puzzle.
The items that caught my eye, and interest, when I researched puzzles for this article were not travel-related as much as place- or time-related. What a great backdrop for discussing life on the farm or a particular city.
Are these not the cutest, retro puzzles for talking to a small child about what life was like when you were their age?
You can do travel-themed, complex, Ravensburger, 1000 piece puzzles or simpler Melissa and Doug puzzles, but if you are going with the suggested geography theme for younger kids, I recommend GeoPuzzles. Why?

They offer varied world and country specific maps.
There are maps in multiple languages.
Most importantly, the puzzle pieces are the shape of the country.

There is no better gift than the gift of conversation, unless of course it is an educational and fun gift given with love.

Poetry as Memoir

Family, How To, Identity, Loss, Sibling Loss

There are many ways to preserve relationships in written records. For those who have hundreds of pages of personal poetry, take the time to peruse what you have captured about family and events set in motion by family members as you create any retrospective about your life or family.
Poetry often captures what prose cannot evoke. When putting together a family history, bring relationships alive with the poetry you created.
This following example links generations and captures what I felt as I made a phone call to an elderly aunt to inform her that my eldest brother had passed away.

In loving memory of my big brother
James L. Hill
Born August 22nd, 1939
Died July 22nd, 2015

Oh Jimmy
you
among those who first greeted me
in life
were the last to leave
family
as complicated as it comes
eldest brother
but last to leave
once we were five
i remember you
i remember you all
in my superstitious brain
i wonder if they met you
Max said Dad and Dave
were there to go with him
i took black cloths from mirrors
months ago
though they draped each memory of you
until today
i only now
reflect on life without you
you always remembered my birthday
and i always knew you loved me
and you were loved
all your life
our aunt, elderly, so frail
closer in age to you
than you to me
fragile tremor in her voice
just said, “oh Jimmy,” when i told her
i swear i could see you as a baby
in her arms in her mind
as she said it
I had never heard you called that
first born son, to first born son
my sweet, gullible brother
teased or bullied for your kindness
your faith
you loved without measure
happiness bursting across your face
whenever you saw me
in spite of your pain
your years of pain
i recited
a buddhist prayer
for me
a psalm for you
the year of mourning ended
in the dark quiet of this day before the dawn
though tears formed like dew to meet the day
—Nancy Hill, 22 July 2016
If you are creating a digital record or history or memoir, consider hyperlinks to images with captions that add concrete information to elements of the poem.
For example, I might link to a an image of my fathers family before he left home or to my brothers.

My dad and his sisters as they prepare to board the school bus. Kosciusko County, Indiana, circa 1930 — Brothers and sisters: Donald, Cora, Carolyn, Elene, Jean, and Maralee Hill, as they prepare to board the school bus. Kosciusko County, Indiana, circa 193o.

Timeline Templates – T of Legacy Tools

A to Z of Legacy 2016

Timelines are some of the most under-utilized genuinely useful tools at your disposal.

Linkage

I am rarely a proponent of linear tools, but timelines can be extremely useful. By turning time into a list, we engage our brains in thinking about sequence. First this, then that… and that often triggers memories of people, events, and things that are connected to the timeline item and would not likely come to mind without activating that initial link.

Order of Events

After decades of life, it is sometimes difficult to remember if “the most embarrassing thing in the whole world that could ever happen and that completely devastated your world” happened during your sophomore or junior year of high school. In retrospect, it is just is not all that important, and details slip away. You think about other high school memories such as the class trip when you first went to the Art Institute. And then you remember, in a eureka moment, the time with your group of girls friends in the A.I. including the girl who caused the most embarrassing moment. And your best friend worked in a taco stand between those two events, and dropped a bottle of hot sauce in the lap of girl who caused the embarrassing moment, so you can recreate and order of events and that helps isolate associated dates.

Verification

Sometimes it is tempting to assign a date to something without verifying the date of the event. Always ask, “How do I know this happened on that date?” It keeps you honest. Your great-grandmother could not have met your great-grandfather in a U.S. Air Force Officers Club in London in 1940. A timeline of world events can help put events into a plausible window of time when a thing could have happened.

Creating Your Timeline

I recommend creating your own overarching timeline with major global, national, regional, state, and local events important to the personal or family history you are documenting.
There is a nifty, keeno, super-cool individual timeline generator that you can find at Our Timelines.
This online program generates a personalized timeline of events that happened in a particular person’s lifetime.
You just enter a name, birth and death dates (or name, birth and the current year) and a timeline with the age of the person when significant events happened is generated. It can be printed or downloaded. It is free.
Page 1 of my timeline is to the right.

The Big 3 of Timelines

In my world view the Big 3 of family history information are made up of one church, one corporation, and one woman. The element of family history is central to Mormon beliefs so the resources the church has amassed is truly impressive. Much of the information is online and free to access. If I could time travel I would go back and invent Ancestry.com as it has made genealogical research accessible and outrageously profitable. Cyndi is one woman who had a very good idea. She shows just how powerful that combination can be!

Mormon

The LDS Church has a vast amount of family research tools available on the web. Their video on creating a timeline using Excel® can be found here. You will have to download Microsoft Silverlight to view it if you are using a Mac OS.

Ancestry.com

Though Ancestry has most resources behind pay-walls, the Learning Center does have some informative articles available. The articles are example heavy and to accomplish some of the neat research shown in the example requires paid membership. But Ancestry is a company so of course they want to feature the full product. Do go check out the site’s take on timelines that you will find at: Cheating on History.

Cyndi’s List

Cyndi’s List is one of the best way-finding tools out there. There is no religious canon directing the site creation and neither is there only a profit motive. This site grew out of one woman’s manifestation of women’s cooperative essence. Sharing makes for a better world. This list of lists that is now twenty years old is well worth exploring. For this article’s topic, start with her section simply called Timelines. In the templates section of the timelines page there are links to Cyndi’s own templates in Evernote, links to really informative, simple to understand posts about timelines on individual blogs such as at AnceStories, and even earlier basic, but useful, printable template from an early Rootsweb website to presentations on timeline grids. Cyndi links to Kathryn Grant’s great 2014, 41 page slide show on cloud-hosted timeline grids.

Crafting Legacy

A to Z of Legacy 2015

Hey Crafters, you were way ahead of the curve where legacy is involved, both technologically and visually.
The legacy we build is the legacy we leave. The love that is poured into an activity with a child or for a loved one can sometimes be felt in the object long after it is crafted.

This is why mothers often have a box of treasures on a shelf somewhere that is filled with lumps of toothpick incised clay shapes and pages of construction paper covered with crayon squiggles.
It goes in both directions.

What you craft is a visual and tactile embodiment of caring. Taking the time to make something beautiful is not only a creative outlet in a life that may or may not have other creative outlets, it is symbolic, and when shared, conveys a personal meaning a purchased gift may not be able to convey.
Crafting often celebrates the processes that have always been infused with love for the people who will enjoy the fruits of those labors.

If you make bread, or sweets with daughters, sons, and grandchildren and talk to them about making pasta, or setting the table for Sunday dinner, or gathering eggs with a grandparent or relative when you were small, you crafts little hooks of meaning and experience upon which the child can latch memories of family, and food, and working with relatives, and family friends, for the rest of their lives.
What once might have been absorbed into life matter-of-factly when we were all creatively engaged in living during more agrarian times, can still be experienced though it does take a bit more planning. The memories we make and the information we share in doing so are well worth the effort.
—
Post 3, the Letter C, Blogging from A to Z April Challenge