Uncovering the history of your local community: oral histories

Some of our trainee oral historians at our first workshop.

When deciding what kinds of methods we wanted to use to uncover the history of local food in Liverpool we went through a range of options. Each had their different strengths, but we also knew that none of them could give us the whole picture. So we decided to attack the problem from a few different angles and see what we uncovered.

Looking at old maps, for example, seems like the most objective way of looking for locations of local food production. Farms, greenhouses and sometimes dairies are often clearly marked. But then again, map makers are not always interested in the kinds of things we’re looking for and so maybe collecting up people’s memories of local food might actually give us a more accurate picture…

Oral History is a technique that was developed with the aim of recording the history of the people that often get left out of official histories. Rather than only being used by academic historians, it’s a technique that many communities have used to record their own history. Feminist movements, civil rights activists, LGBT communities and working class communities are all groups where oral history has played an important role in recording experiences so that they can be shared with future generations.

One of the aims of the Memories of Mr Seel’s Garden project is to provide volunteers from Transition Liverpool, Friends of Everton Park and Friends of Sudley Estate with experience in conducting oral histories, so that these groups can then go out an collect the kinds of historical information they are each interested in.

Some of our hopes and fears…

So for our first oral history workshop, led by Dr Niamh Moore from the University of Manchester, at Sudley House we completed an introduction session aimed at getting us ready to start doing our first interviews. This including exploring our hopes and fears, collectively developing ideas about what makes a good interview, practicising interviewing each other and then brainstorming the questions we wanted to ask at the interviews themselves.

Some of our favourite questions included:

• Is there a food smell that reminds you of the past?
• Tell me about your first trip to a restaurant?
• Did you ever eat food that wasn’t bought from a shop?
• Did you ever collect wild food? What/where/when ….
• Do you remember local food growers/makers and where were they?
• And of course: What is your understanding of the term ‘local food’?

Brainstorming interview questions

We then discussed key issues to do with consent from interviewees, copyright issues and what do with the interviews once we have them. At the end we were all looking forward to heading up to Everton to do our first interviews!

Thanks to Niamh for running the workshop, Frances Downie for organising, National Museums Liverpool for providing us with the workshop space and the Sudley House Tearoom for providing us with such lovely lunch and afternoon tea!