Collecting and Sharing Your Stories

Guidelines for Submitting Oral History

Each community and family has a flavor all its own. This may be reflected in foods, activities at community celebrations, even games at birthday parties. Students can learn so much from the people around them. Have them talk with relatives, neighbors, visit a nursing home, museum or historic site.

• Tell us about games, music, foods, clothing, celebrations, wedding traditions, colloquialisms, leisure activities, or remedies for stomachaches, bad dreams and broken hearts.
• Can you determine the origins of these traditions?
• Can your students determine the ethnic history of your community, and the ethnic diversity of your community today?
• Do they see examples of one group learning / adopting the traditions of another? Are there elders who can tell stories about “the way it used to be”?
• Are there recent immigrants who may want to share what it was like to move to Texas, first impressions, or what traditions from their homeland were most important for them to carry on here in their new home?
• Older students may want to use the Oral History Guide from the Adopt-a-Nursing Home program.
• Some students may want to participate in the Exploring Texas Roots Project. This is a genealogical research project. Upon receiving the completed questionnaire, the Community Outreach Project will send the student a certificate of participation. Due to the personal nature of this information, we won’t publish this on our Exploring Texas website.

Please keep stories brief, one to three paragraphs is best. Email would be the easiest for us, but we will accept letters. We can handle a limited number of pictures. You can email jpegs or mail pictures or slides. We can scan photos or slides and return them, but plan on this process taking a while. If you know how to create a web page, email the web page to us. If you have an educational, non-commercial website, we can link to the page there.

If first and last names are used, please get permission from the subjects to share the story on our website. Email stories to: education@tpwd.state.tx.us