Stories and photos help us keep our memories fresh, our thoughts of family and friends alive.
Sally Hopkins offered up a photo of her late brother, Edward Hopkins, a Snohomish County man and Army sergeant, to add to the Wall of Faces, an online memorial that puts photos to the names of those who died in the Vietnam War.
“It helps us because our loved ones aren’t forgotten and the sacrifice they made is not forgotten,” she told Herald Writer Noah Haglund for a story in today’s edition. “I don’t want those stories to be lost.”
The stories are there to be told, but every day we risk losing more of those stories, more of the family histories that are part of American history. For example, more than 16 million Americans served during World War II. About 855,000 survive today, but nearly 500 are estimated to die each day.
The stories are told around the holiday dinner table, or more quietly among friends or between parent and child. They are committed to memory, but they are less frequently written down or recorded to be kept and passed on.
StoryCorps, a nationwide nonprofit oral history project, since 2003 has collected and archived more than 50,000 interviews with more than 90,000 participants. The interviews, often between family members, are preserved at the Library of Congress. Along with weekly broadcasts of select interviews on National Public Radio, many of the interviews also are available on the StoryCorps website.
Among its programs, the Military Voices Initiative honors the stories of those who served in the military and their families. StoryCorps invites people to record their stories at studios in San Francisco, Chicago and Atlanta, but it also offers a mobile studio that travels the country and will make its next visit to the Seattle area from Aug. 6 to Sept. 4. Appointments for interviews can be made at its website, storycorps.org. Interviews can also recorded anywhere with most smartphones, then sent to StoryCorps with a smartphone app.
Even those lost in battle or who died in the years after their service can still have their stories told.
An interview broadcast Friday on NPR stations was between a woman whose father was killed by a roadside bomb in Vietnam and a fellow soldier. Tony Cistaro and Sgt. Major Lisa Torello, who shares her father’s rank, interviewed each other, Cistaro telling Torello that she had the same smile as her father.
Of course, stories don’t have to be shared with everyone. Your interview can be kept solely for your family’s benefit using the technology of your choice, from video camera to tape recorder to pen and paper.
Unsure of what to ask or how to get the stories started? StoryCorps offers the following suggestions:
- Where did you serve?
- What are your strongest memories of your time during war?
- How did war change you?
- What lessons did you learn?
We have Memorial Day to honor those who died serving their country. We can honor their memories by preserving their stories.
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