Oral histories are a crucial part of your genealogy research. Whether you are conducting them or reading them, you will get invaluable information from them that you almost certainly won’t find anywhere else. The details from oral histories can help guide you to new avenues of research, fill in personal details and information gaps in your family tree, and bring long forgotten events and people back to virtual life again (and preserve them for future generations).
Most conventional genealogical research advice recommends that you start your family history journey with yourself, then work backward in time through all the people you know personally or know about with certainty. Along the way, one of the first steps you should take as you begin connecting one generation to another is to interview the oldest members of your family. They have information and memories that no one else does, and can bring your family history to life in amazing and unexpected ways. You may even solve some long-standing family mysteries just by talking to your older relatives. Maybe they never talked about these mysteries before because no one asked them. You can be the first, and get your genealogy research off to a powerful start...