Jeff Benedict shows perfectly how your life’s story can be told as simply and profoundly in a few columns in a newspaper. It is ultimately the connections between us that are important.
Remember to tell you life’s story…to yourself, your friends, your family…and to me.
Here’s Ray Brown’s life as told by Jeff Benedict.
A neighbor of mine, Michael Frank, is a Mark Twain scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a part of a project producing volumes of his writings we’ve never read before. What follows are some of those excerpts told in Mark Twains signature ascerbic style:
ON THE AMERICAN BUSINESS CLASS
“The multimillionaire disciples of Jay Gould — that man who in his brief life rotted the commercial morals of this nation and left them stinking when he died — have quite completely transformed our people from a nation with pretty high and respectable ideals to just the opposite of that; that our people have no ideals now that are worthy of consideration; that our Christianity which we have always been so proud of — not to say vain of — is now nothing but a shell, a sham, a hypocrisy; that we have lost our ancient sympathy with oppressed peoples struggling for life and liberty; that when we are not coldly indifferent to such things we sneer at them, and that the sneer is about the only expression the newspapers and the nation deal in with regard to such things.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/books/10btwain.html?ref=books
I belong to this professional organization because I agree with their philosophy and approach to the family story. While most of the members are biographical writers, I have found my passion in the short genealogical sketch which attaches photos and short vignettes. I post them for the family members in a password protected environment.
The Association of Personal Historians meets annually as a group, and also quarterly as a regional group to provide support and encouragement for its members.
I attended the 2009 conference in Philadelphia and plan to attend the 2010 conference in Victoria, BC.