What family archives are tucked into your drawers and boxes, in an attic or basement—letters, diaries, photos, postcards, notebooks?

What do you plan for your own papers, your legacy?

What do we do with all this rich stuff?!

Kim Bancroft will explain how she has used family papers and interviews to capture stories and memories in a larger historical context. Her process of researching and organizing her own family’s papers led to her book Writing Themselves into History: Emily and Matilda Bancroft in Journals and Letters (Heyday 2022). She has also used recorded interviews to inform the biography she wrote, The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin: The Damn Good Times of a Fiercely Independent Publisher (Heyday 2014), along with other self-published memoirs, such as The Stories of Fred Short, American Indian Movement Spiritual Leader.

After presenting possibilities for working with one’s treasure chest of archives, workshop attendees can share actual items they’re hoping to preserve and/or their thoughts on this process.

What do we need to know or do in order to create some kind of narrative or album for our legacy, tangible or digital? Kim will facilitate this conversation about wading through the waters of our pasts.