An invitation
To everyone in this family, whatever age you are: let your life be recorded while you are here to tell it.
Nearly everything on this website survives by accident.
Willi kept a notebook from 1921 to 1930 and then carried it across three countries and half the world; had he thrown it out we would have almost nothing in his own voice. Derek sat down in 2008 and wrote fifty-two pages of his life, and finished them not long before he died. Ludwig went through the Villingen records in 1986 because the butcher’s shop was turning a hundred and fifty. Three people who happened to write things down.
Everybody else is a name and a set of dates. Seven thousand of them, and that is now all they will ever be. Not because their lives were smaller, but because nobody asked while there was still somebody to ask.
So this is the standing invitation. If you are related to this family by blood or by marriage, I would like to record your life: what you remember, in your own words, at whatever length you are willing to give it. It costs you nothing but the time, and it is the one part of this archive that cannot be gathered later.
An hour or two at your kitchen table, or over the phone, or on a video call if that is easier. I ask the questions; there is nothing to prepare and nothing to bring. Most people find the first twenty minutes odd and then forget the recorder is there.
Longhand or typed, a page at a time, at your own pace. Ask and I will send a list of questions to work through, which is a good deal easier than a blank page. Derek did it this way.
Say who is in them and what was going on. A surprising amount comes out that way, sideways, while you are looking at something else - and it rescues the photographs at the same time, since an unnamed face is lost within a generation.
Some people will want all three, spread over a year. Some will want twenty minutes on the telephone. Both are worth having, and nobody is committing to anything by saying yes to a first conversation.
Almost everyone says this, and almost everyone is wrong. It is worth saying plainly why.
What no other record holds is the ordinary week. What a job paid and what that bought. What a house cost. What was for tea, and who cooked it. What you did on a Saturday, who you courted, and who your parents thought you should have courted instead. Certificates give the dates; only you can give the rest, and once you cannot, no archive anywhere can supply it.
Derek’s memoir is the proof of it. The best pages are not about anything anyone would call an achievement: they are about a twelve-foot-square shed on a block at Ferntree Gully, a year spent conducting trams, and the exact terms of a falling-out with his father. That is the part his grandchildren read.
You get it back. The recording and a typed copy of every word are yours, to keep or to hand on to your children, whatever else happens to them.
You get the last word. If you would like the sessions worked up into a written life story, I will do that, and nothing is treated as finished until you have read it and are content with every line.
Nothing is published unless you say so. Agreeing to be recorded is not agreeing to be put on this website, and the two questions are asked separately. The archive behind these pages is private, and only a small and deliberately chosen part of it is ever public.
“Not until after I am gone” is a normal request. Plenty of what is worth recording is not for saying out loud this year. Say so, and it is written down against the file and honoured.
Derek gave the reason better than anyone since. Asked why he spent five
years of his retirement on the family history, he said: It’s the
family that we come from; you have to record that sort of thing, it’s
wrong not to.
Write, ring or message, and we will find a time. Yes, no and maybe are all fine answers, and if the answer is no you will not be asked twice.
The same goes if you are not on this website at all. The family went out of Villingen in every direction: to Minnesota in 1881, to Rochester in 1923, to Melbourne and Brisbane around 1930. If you descend from one of those branches, I would be glad to hear from you, and your life belongs in the record every bit as much.
Write to Michael at [email protected]