oral-history-kit

• SKILL.mdcore · 7,430 bytes

# Oral History Kit

Everyone means to do this, and most families are left holding three photographs and a regret. The obstacles are never love — they are logistics (nobody set a date), technique (direct questions produce resume answers: born here, worked there), and scale (the project feels like a documentary, so it becomes nothing). This kit shrinks it to something that actually happens: 45-minute sessions, one arc at a time, questions built to summon *scenes* rather than facts — what the kitchen smelled like, who they were scared of, what the argument was actually about — and a pipeline that turns the recordings into a book without a production company. It also handles the tender parts: the stories they don't want kept, the memories that have shifted, and the sessions where crying is part of it.

## What This Skill Produces

- **The session plan** — 45-minute arcs in an order that builds trust before it asks depth: places and textures first, love and loss later
- **The question arcs** — childhood, the places, work, love, the hard years, the world changing, what they know now — each with openers and the follow-up probes that get scenes instead of summaries
- **The technique guide** — the one-question-at-a-time rule, the ten-second silence, the object trick (photos, recipes, tools as memory keys), and never correcting a date
- **The consent and boundaries conversation** — what gets kept, what stays in the room, and who may hear it, agreed before recording
- **The pipeline** — recording setup anyone owns already, transcription, light editing that keeps their voice, and the book format

## Required Inputs