Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen
A "brick-wall" DIY genealogy podcast that features your questions and Kathleen Brandt's answers. She wants your stories, questions, and “brick walls”. But be ready to add to your "to-do" list. As Kathleen always says, this is a Do it yourself (DIY) genealogy podcast. “I'll show you where the shovel is, but I'm not digging up your family.”
Maybe, you have no idea where to start searching for an ancestor. Or, perhaps you want to know more about your family folklore. Host Kathleen has 20 years in the industry and is the founder of a3genealogy. She's able to dispense genealogy research advice and encouragement in understandable terms that won't get you lost in genealogy jargon. Along with her husband and co-host, John, she helps you accomplish "do-it-yourself" research goals, learn some history, and have a bit of fun along the way. Light-hearted and full of detailed info, Hittin' the Bricks is your solution for your brick-wall research problems.
Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen
The Tell Me a Story Program: A Chat with Emily
Emily Wildhaber from Midwest Genealogy Center joins us to discuss their "Tell Me a Story" program that preserves family stories through oral history.
For more information visit:
Tell Me a Story from Mid-West Genealogy Center
Be sure to bookmark linktr.ee/hittinthebricks for your one stop access to Kathleen Brandt, the host of Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen. And, visit us on YouTube: Off the Wall with Kathleen John and Chewey video recorded specials.
Hittin' the Bricks is produced through the not-for-profit, 501c3 TracingAncestors.org.
Ladies and gentlemen from the depths of flyover country in the heartland of America, the Kansas City on the other side of the Mighty Mo, welcome to Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen, the do-it-yourself genealogy podcast, with your questions and her answers. I am John, your humble hubby host, and today we'll be chatting with Emily Wildhaber about the Tell Me a Story program at the Midwest Genealogy Center. There's a lot to this story, so let's start hitting the bricks.
John:So we're, here with Emily Wildhaber from the Midwest Genealogy Center and that was really easy for me to remember because it's written in big letters behind her.
Kathleen:That's true. I got this nice big backdrop, just so no one forgets.
John:Thank you, which is part of the Mid-Continent Public Libraries, I should say Is that why you asked that, John? That was a genuine question before we started.
Kathleen:I was making sure I understood which association was what. Yeah, so we are, of course, a genealogy center. We are also a public library, and so, in addition to providing access to genealogy resources and helping people with their research, we also provide general internet access. You know, a cooling space, the warming space, a place where people can make prints or copies or and otherwise get connected to resources.
Emily:Emily, as far as Midwest Genealogy Center goes, tell us a little bit more about that.
Kathleen:So Mid-Continent is a public library system here, based in Kansas City. It's one of the largest public library systems in the country. I think we've got about 34 branches at last count. The Midwest Genealogy Center is one of those branches. So again, we live in both worlds. We are a public library, we are also a genealogy center. Our entire collection is genealogy materials here in our building, which makes us the largest freestanding public genealogy collection in the United States.
Kathleen:Allen County has a larger collection but it is part of their general collection, part of their public library, and then in Salt Lake City they are also larger than us in their collection but they're private as opposed to public. So other than that, we've been in the building we're currently in for about 15 years. All of our services are free to the public. We offer assistance with genealogy research. We help connect people with resources. You can access 30-some genealogy databases from our branch as well as a physical collection of over 250,000 books and over. I think we're close to 100k in microfilm materials right now microfiche. So very, very large collection, and that covers not just the Midwest. The name that's a misnomer. We get a lot that people think we only cover the Midwest or we only cover Kansas City. The title refers to our location, does not refer to our collection, so our collection is both national and international.
Emily:John Midwest Genealogy Center is just to me is home, because I first of all was there day one when they built the new center and giving tours for the first year and a half or two years. We were giving tours as volunteers and I absolutely love that library. It makes me so happy. Emily, tell us a little bit more about you and your position at the library.
Kathleen:So I am an assistant manager at the Midwest Genealogy Center. So I'm involved first of all in day-to-day operations, you know kind of the oh-so-glamorous behind the scenes. I keep the schedules and I make sure we have toilet paper and all that kind of stuff. Additionally I oversee a couple of projects here at the Midwest Genealogy Center, including our Tell Me a Story program, which is our oral history program.
John:And that's really kind of where this whole conversation came up between us. Kathleen was the Tell Me a Story and I can't remember what the circumstances were. Oh, I think it was about Aunt Ada and Aunt Melba yes, oh, that's correct.
Emily:So, emily, we have a 93-year-old and a 94-year-old, our aunts of which we are not related. We are not related to them, but they were my mother's best friends, and they're 93 and 94. One's still married, and her husband is also 93. And so we were thinking about trying to figure out how we could record their stories. Absolutely.
Kathleen:You got to get them.
Emily:And that's what came about, but I don't know how to do that.
Kathleen:So Tell Me a Story. It's a program I feel really passionately about that we have to offer here at the Midwest Genealogy Center. Oral history is something that really goes hand in hand with genealogy. There's not a day that goes by here that we don't have someone saying, well, I just wish I had talked to my grandma about this, or I just wish I had asked Aunt Ada about X kind of a thing. And so here at MGC we consider it part of our mission not just to be a repository for existing genealogy records but to also help create genealogy records for future generations, and so that is really the intent with that Tell Me a Story program. Huge personal value as well, you know, to have something to be able to pass down to your kids, your descendants, to have a memory to hang on to so many aspects of an oral history that preserve information you couldn't get anywhere else. So the sound of someone's voice and their mannerisms and their gestures and the way they felt on particular topics really gives a lot of depth and a lot of life to a genealogical tree that you wouldn't maybe otherwise get from looking in census records and digging through probate. So to give you a little bit on the history.
Kathleen:The Tell Me Story program was started here at MGC in 2010, which is a little before my time, but at that point MCPL Mid-Continent partnered with NPR's StoryCorps program. I think you mentioned that, kathleen, so you're familiar. Yeah, they came in and they did a lot of interviews here in the KC area and MCPL was kind of their home base that they partnered through and they collected, I think, 200 or more stories in that time and then, as is the model of StoryCorps, they kind of they packed up and they moved on to the next city, right. But even after they left, midconn found that there was still a lot of enthusiasm around this idea and around the idea of preserving stories in our local area, and so they said let's do this for ourselves, let's keep it rolling.
Kathleen:So they rolled out the Tell Me a Story program. It started with just a handful of what we call our Tell Me a Story kits that you can check out just like a book. You can put them on hold, have them sent to your branch, renew them, and they contain everything you would need to do an oral history at home, including a little recording device, instructions on how to use it, sample questions to help you get started if you're just not quite sure what you want to talk about. They created a few of those, just a very, very soft launch. I think there were four to start, and it was so popular and they were always checked out, so they eventually secured a grant to expand that and now we have about 40 oral history kits I did not know that and tell me this.
Emily:Is that what you're calling on your website? I think I saw traveling kits. Is that what that is?
Kathleen:Yes, yes, they're great for anyone who's maybe a little shy about coming in and telling their story. You can sit down with them in a comfortable space in the comfort of their home. It's great for the homebound. They come in and they say oh, we have a family reunion coming up in South Carolina and I'm going to take a kid out there and we're just going to see what we can get.
Emily:So how do they check?
Kathleen:these out With a Mid-Continent Public Library card, same as anything else in our collection.
Emily:Oh, wow, literally checking out a kit.
John:And the cards. The Mid-Continent Library card is quite expensive, isn't it?
Kathleen:No, if you live in our service area it is completely free. There you go. Yes, so if you are in Jackson Johnson, platt or Clay County, thank you. In Platte or Clay County, thank you, that is free to check out. Yes, so to your point, john, we do have some options even if you live outside the area. If you're interested in accessing our resources you know accessing our databases after you go home we do have some paid options for people that travel into CS. So those cost about what you would expect to pay in taxes to the library system if you lived in our area. So that's kind of how they determine that and that I didn't I'll be honest with you.
John:I didn't realize that there was a cost associated if you were outside of an area that's true, yes, so my comment was I I assumed it was zero cost, because for everyone cost for me.
Emily:So no, it's not, that's for you.
John:Yes, you pay taxes for I thought it was just special.
Kathleen:You, would we get that money from you another time?
John:We get that money from you at tax season. I'm happy to pay it. I'm happy to pay my taxes for libraries. You should be able to have more as far as I'm concerned.
Kathleen:Preaching to the choir John.
Emily:So how long are these kits checked out for and can they be renewed like a book also, they check out for four weeks, which is the standard.
Kathleen:Yes, check a time for a book. They can be renewed, can come in and return it and check out a new one, so there's really no limits there. The recorders inside, I believe, can hold up to 1,300 hours of audio recording, so I would be extremely impressed if anyone was ever able to fill one up.
John:Can we go down to the tech rabbit hole? Absolutely. My question is what format are we recording in and how is it stored?
Kathleen:The recorders record in WAV files. The WAV files and from there each recording is processed by a staff member here at the Midwest Genealogy Center and we will convert them to MP3 is generally how we return it to the customer. We do some light editing, so basically just like sound quality. If you have any big gaps, or sometimes we will have customers specifically request in the recording hey, I didn't feel really comfortable with this part of it. Can you just trim that out? So we'll do that kind of cleanup.
Kathleen:We throw a little informational bumper on the front with our tell me story, here's our program, et cetera, and from there everyone who participates in the program gets a free copy of their recording. They have a few options of how they want to receive that. Currently we are set up to do either a USB or a burnt CD mailed to you, or we can transfer that file over a secure file share via email. Customers will opt in on which one they want to receive and then we process that, send that to them and then they can also have that included either or in our digital collection on our website. They can be made publicly accessible if they're comfortable with that, if they want it to be part of our larger collection or archived here as a physical copy here at the library.
Emily:So who owns that physical copy at the library and who can?
Kathleen:use it. We are stewards of someone else's story. Your story is your own and you have the right to decide what is done with that and who gets to hear it. So if anyone comes in and wants to use our program and they only want a copy for themselves, wonderful, we will process that, we will send it to you, we will delete the files on our end and it is yours to do with from there on out. If we have the consent of the interviewee, then they sign a release form and it is included on our digital collection. We incorporate it, we make it publicly accessible. Just from again, a genealogical and historical perspective. We may use it in historical programming, oral history programming, social media, that kind of thing.
Emily:Is this something that the public or our listeners can actually listen to? Some from home. They're uploaded on the website also.
Kathleen:Yes. So if you visit mymcplorg and go to the Midwest Genealogy Center's page, we do have our Tell Me a Story landing page which walks you through the three different facets of the program, which includes that circulating kits, our oral history recording room and our Tell Me a Story pod. And then it also has our digital collections. We have one on Rosie the Riveter women women who were working during World War II. We have a bowling league that was bowling under segregation in Kansas City in the 60s. We have one that we spoke with. Some chiefs, some members of the chief's team were interviewed, and so a lot of fun things in that collection. I encourage anyone who's interested to go and check it out and those can all be found on our website so it's all kind of historical or is capturing in a moment or an event, but it's not all genealogy.
Emily:Is that correct?
Kathleen:I think it's a, it's a, it's a uh, liberal view of what, what we can qualify as genealogy, yes, some people get very much into. Here are stories about my mother, here are stories about my grandmother, here are the people I am tied to. That is maybe a more direct A to B genealogical collection, but it's difficult to predict, we in the current moment, what future generations are going to find interesting, what future generations are going to find interesting. Future generations are going to want to know about our lives in this current moment and how we experienced it, and so every person has a unique perspective on their moment in history, and we want to preserve as many of those perspectives as we can and as much of that as we can.
Emily:John, do you have questions? Because if not, I'm going to keep asking.
John:No, I'm absolutely loving that you're getting all my questions in. You know, my main thing was I was trying to understand the tech behind it, just because I think it's remarkable the amount of storage you must be allocating as well to house these files.
Kathleen:It is a lot of space. We do primarily audio recordings as opposed to video recordings, just because a video recording is going to be much, much larger. But that is one thing. We really encourage our customers who are either getting ready to do an oral history project or already have one and are thinking about what to do with it, to think about those long term storage questions. And you know, we kind of think, kind of think about digital media as forever you put something on a flash drive and you put it in a drawer and you forget about it, or on a burnt CD or put it on a laptop and what happens when that laptop crashes or when CDs and flash drives erode over time. So we always encourage people to back things up. We always encourage duplicate accounts. Our archive, our digital collection is another way that they can kind of have that security and have that peace of mind of we do have the resources of an institution as opposed to, you know, a single person with a laptop that could crash.
Emily:Do you ever have people who take the kits and they don't want you all to edit them, they just want to edit it themselves.
Kathleen:That's a great question. Theoretically, the recorders that we have in the kits have a USB connection attached to them and so, theoretically, if whoever is checking them out is kind of tech savvy enough, they do the recordings, plug it into a computer, transfer all those files over themselves, delete it, return it back to us. I will never know the difference and that is theirs to to do with, as they will. Again, we are trying to provide the resources, uh, to do this kind of collection, but, um, what you do with where you take it is theirs.
John:But in terms of if anyone just wanted a raw file sent to them with with no additions, we would certainly accommodate that. So, emily, you speak as if you actually have a background in film and audio, do you?
Kathleen:I have background in oral history. Specifically, I did English and anthropology and folklore in college and kind of through the combination of things, I wound up sitting down with a lot of people and collecting stories through oral history.
John:Because of that background, when I came here.
Kathleen:It kind of was a natural transition to slot into the Tell Me A Story program. Here I have learned a lot on the job. I will tell you. I have fiddled with my first soundboards and I have dealt with in the field tech issues. And what are we going to do about this? Thing is not working and nobody knows why and how are we going to handle it. And so you learn a lot by doing for sure. I wish I had more of a tech background.
Emily:honestly, Do children ever come in for recordings?
Kathleen:So our Tell Me a Story program is open to all ages. Particularly, we tend to get a lot of, we tend to get the most engagement from kids with our Tell Me a Story pod, which is the third facet of our Tell Me a Story program. That is a mobile recording booth that travels around to our various mid-continent branches and collects stories in that area. It's kind of set up more for bite-sized oral histories. So people come in, they record a quick story and then they go about their day. They return their books. Because of the look of the pod it kind of looks like a spaceship. It's fun, it's got fun colors on it and everything. And just by nature of where we place them in libraries where you've got story times, you've got kids coming and going it tends to get the most engagement from smaller children.
Kathleen:So we get some some very, very delightful recordings of kids coming in and talking about their favorite animal or or uh, just kind of telling a a random story that they make up on the spot or that kind of thing and just personally, those are always really fun for me to process also, uh, we've had we get feedback from from parents after we process those recordings and we send them in where they say you know, I never would have thought to sit down and take the time to record five minutes, ten minutes, with my six-year-old child. But now that I have this, I'm so glad that I have this moment, I have their voice, that I have this moment, I have their voice, I have their unique way of speaking and their funny perspective on things at this moment in time. Forever that's something I get to keep and look back on.
Emily:How do the kids and their parents find out the locations? Is that posted, previously posted or posted ahead of time on the website?
Kathleen:On that Tell Me a Story page on our website. We have usually the upcoming two or three months where you can expect to find that, and then we try to also do a little social media blast whenever it moves somewhere new. So it is currently in Smithville and it just wrapped up a month here at MGC and so you can check out for updates on that schedule. You can check out mymcplorg. So I mentioned two of the three facets of our oral history program. That was the circulating kits and the Tell Me a Story pod which travels around to library branches. The third aspect actually lives here at MGC and I am sitting in it right now.
Kathleen:It is our oral history recording room. So this is a retrofitted recording space with professional grade microphones. We have audio paneling to help with the sound control, we have a soundboard and this space is available for reservation. So if we have any customers who are maybe a little tech shy they don't want to, they don't want to grapple with the recording element themselves or they want a really professional high grade sounding recording they can call us, schedule an appointment in this space. They'll sit down with a staff person who will run all the tech and they don't have to worry about it and they can just either sit down and a staff person will actually interview them, if that is what they, if that's what they prefer, or if they want to bring in someone to sit down and talk with. We will just facilitate that conversation. So that is a really great opportunity. I think it's kind of a uh hidden treasure here at mgc, that uh that not too many know about. So I want to make sure to to my gosh, yes, and then the other thing.
Kathleen:I want to make sure to promote that, my gosh yes, and then the other thing I wanted to make sure to mention we do also, in addition to providing resources for oral history, I think it's really important to also provide an educational piece as well, and so we do offer here, as part of our classes, an introduction to oral history. At MGC class. I teach that here I just wrapped up um one at the end of july and so that will be going up on our youtube page shortly that people can go back and listen to if they didn't have a chance to catch it live and we go through everything. We go through why oral history is important and why we do it, and how you can start a project and what tools you need and interview, tips and tricks and how you process it afterwards so kind of a crash course on everything you might need for an oral history. This is wonderful.
John:Yeah, it always is the same is that every time we talk to somebody from the library system, there is so much that's offered. It's absolutely remarkable what you get from the public library system. It's extraordinary and if I could, I'd bang my hand on the desk.
Emily:Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. Have you had any interesting story that you think is like the best that you've listened to?
Kathleen:Oh, that's such a good question and such a tough question.
Kathleen:I really I feel very privileged, very honored to get to interact with so many people and hear their stories and I do genuinely, passionately believe that each of us are carrying around so many fascinating memories that are worth talking about and worth preserving.
Kathleen:Some of my favorites we did a display case here at the Midwest Genealogy Center where all of our staff brought in items that were of like family significance to them, so like personal. I brought in some handmade Christmas ornaments that my great grandma had crocheted, like little crocheted snowflakes. People brought in quilts and recipes and dishware and just all kinds of things, and as part of that display I sat down with each of the staff members and just talked about tell me about your piece, tell me about why that matters to you, tell me what it means. And I mean there's no greater privilege in the world than to just get to sit down with people and say tell me what's important to you. So it's again, it's a beautiful field, I feel really strongly about it, and then it's also just fun, like, again, the kids ones that come in. We had a kid get into the pod one time. I'm sitting in my office, which has no windows, on my little computer processing these recordings.
John:And.
Kathleen:I pull this up and all of a sudden I hear just this tiny child's voice go once upon a time it's, it's, it's delightful.
Emily:It's so fun. So have you done your own story, Emily.
Kathleen:I haven't. I'm such a hypocrite. I haven't done my own story.
John:There we go.
Kathleen:Did you do this stuff about the part? You brought in. Yes, I did. I do have the recording from my great-grandma's ornaments I have sat down and talked with. Like I said, as part of when I was in school, I sat down and talked with my grandparents and kind of talked about our family history there. I've talked to my father and I've got some stuff on on his side of the family, so I'm working on it. We're getting there.
John:Emily, we'll make sure that our our listeners have access through all the links to the library. And to tell me a story on our show notes Fantastic Thank you.
Emily:Emily, thanks for joining us today. This has been really good.
Kathleen:Thank you so much for having me on. I'm always thrilled to talk about oral history with anybody who will listen, and it's a great one to chat about. So thank you for your time.
Emily:And thanks, john, for joining us today. What for?
John:joining us today. Yeah, I normally just stop by, press the two buttons, then walk away. Well, congratulations, you made it to the end of another episode. Thanks so much for staying. Thanks to Emily for telling us her story. Thanks to Chewy Chewbacca Brand for his unwavering lack of interest in anything we're doing. The theme song for Hittin' the Bricks was written and performed by Tony Fist, the Acadiax Watch for the next appearance in the basement of Kelly's Mule Barn. Do you have a genealogical question for Kathleen? Drop us a line at hittingthebricks at gmailcom and let us know.
