Since the moment I assigned Sara her oral history project, her biggest concern was finding someone to interview. While she lives with her mother in town, she has no other relatives nearby. After much deliberation, she finally decided to interview her elderly neighbor, Gerald "Moon" Mullins. Several weeks following the interview, Sara came running into the classroom. "He died, Mrs. Jordan. Moon died last night!" she cried. Sara asked me if she could give the tape recording of the interview to Mr. Mullin’s widow. Our class had not yet listened to Sara’s interview with Mr. Mullins, so we decided to listen to the recording that day.

The students sat quietly as they listened to Mr. Mullins share his life story. Answering the questions posed by Sara, he described his humble boyhood home, named his mother’s fourteen brothers and sisters, and provided many details of his life.

"My happiest memories are about going to school, and my saddest memories are about going to bed hungry. At Christmas, there was plenty to eat. On our vacations, we would travel to the Colorado River and go fishing–there was always plenty to eat when we were fishing.

"When we were little, we were taught to respect our elders and neighbors and now it seems like kids don’t have any respect for anything or anybody."

At the conclusion of the interview, Sara asked Mr. Mullins for any advice he would give to young people today. He simply said, "Respect the property of others. If you want something, work for it; you’ll take better care of it and it will be better for you in the long run."

The experience Sara had with Mr. Mullins was not unusual in our fourth-grade class. Three years ago, our school, Woodland Heights Elementary in Brownwood, Texas received a service learning grant from the Corporation for National Service. These grants are given to classrooms across the nation in collaboration with Learn and Serve America and, in our state, the Texas Center for Service Learning. In this program, students are given the opportunity to perform community service within a curriculum that meets local, state, and national requirements. Needs assessments, projects with community partners, reflections, evaluations, and celebrations are all part of the curriculum. The implementation of the grant has allowed many of the students to discover their history in a very unique way, and to work on community projects that have strengthened both the town and the children.

The service project we ultimately implemented was shared between two fourth-grade classes. It focused on a public awareness campaign to help reopen our local county museum that had been closed for two years. The students wrote letters to city and county officials and key citizens, documented newspaper articles about the museum, and surveyed all of the fourth graders in the county to determine their knowledge of, and interest in, the museum.

Also among the components of the curriculum was an effort to focus the students’ enthusiasm for history through recording oral histories. Our grant money provided the means to purchase recorders, microphones, and cassette tapes.

The first year was a time of trial and error for our classes, but we learned a lot about the project. To prepare the students for their oral history assignments, I arranged for several members of the community to speak to them. The classes watched a unique visual oral history of one of the community’s older citizens. Her son created a professional video of her oral history against the backdrop of a pictorial essay.

Another guest speaker talked to the students about the actual oral history interview. He spoke about making the person feel comfortable, being a good listener, asking in-depth questions. He also gave the students practical tips on properly working the recorder. Since that time, these guests have visited the classes each year, helping new students learn how to produce the best possible oral history.

We learned after the first year of the project to give a copy of the questions to the interviewee before the actual interview. The students write letters of introduction to the potential interviewees, requesting the opportunity to interview him or her, and include the list of questions. This list is a great help to the students, since the interviewees have time to think about the questions prior to the interview.

The children have had incredible experiences and have learned much about themselves, their past, and the lives of some remarkable people in their families and community.

He learned that his great-great-aunt served as a missionary in China for more than thirty years. Beginning her career in the mission field as a single woman just after the turn of the century, Orvia Proctor worked in China until the Communists forced her out. She continued her work in Burma for many more years. During these remarkable years, she chronicled her daily life with the Chinese people in an extensive collection of black and white photographs that filled three albums. Mark was able to share the photo albums with his fourth grade classmates.

Kari traveled to her grandmother’s home in Minnesota for the Christmas holidays. While she was there, she conducted a video interview with her great-grandfather. She heard stories of his farm life in Minnesota at the turn of the last century. She learned that when he was a young boy, he was responsible for his infant sister while his mother worked in the fields. When the baby got hungry, he carried her more than a half mile to the fields so his mother could feed her. As the oldest child in the family, Kari’s grandfather was expected to help with the cooking. By the age of eight, he was baking nine loaves of bread three times a week for his family.

Kari’s great-grandfather died just five months after her interview with him. Her parents expressed their gratitude to me that their daughter was assigned a project that was so valuable to the entire family.

Rachel interviewed her 106-year-old great-aunt Lillie. Rachel learned that her aunt worked as a midwife, delivering more than three hundred babies, including three of her own grandchildren. As a child, Lillie and her family picked cotton. Lillie also drove a team of oxen to plow the fields and to go into town.

While the stories are all different, the children have had many similar experiences and have learned many important lessons. The stories they are gathering from their families and friends are giving them an added perspective of life and the past.

Dusty’s research of his grandfather produced a family treasure. He received a notebook full of genealogical documentation that his grandfather had collected. Many of the stories, dates, and events Mark learned during the interview with his grandfather are featured in the old photographs and newspaper articles.

Because of the experiences these students have had in recording oral histories, I believe their enthusiasm will continue to grow into a lifetime interest in family history, and their awareness of heritage will foster the joy of collecting, preserving, and sharing oral histories.

The students also participate in an activity that involves the entire community. They have helped develop the school museum, which consists of family artifacts the students bring from home to share. Students bring a variety of items to display, such as old tools, war medals, kitchen gadgets, quilts, stone building blocks, and books.

Before the museum opens each year, the students make documentation cards for their items, arrange the displays, and act as docents during the days the museum is open to the public. The oral histories they have compiled come alive as the students enthusiastically explain the history of the artifacts they have displayed. Often, the students stand back and let adult guests explain in more detail some of the specific uses of the items.

Our classes accomplished their primary goal when the local museum was reopened at the end of the first year of the project. Because of our efforts, the classes were honored by historic preservation leaders at the grand reopening of the museum. It was the climactic end-of-the-year event. But in many ways, the event was only a small part of the benefits the children received throughout the duration of the project.

Since then, the project has continued at different levels. The students have helped the local historical commission research the historic area of our town. Using Sanborn fire insurance maps and old city directories, they documented the inevitable changes that have occurred in the downtown area. This town research is an appendage of the histories they collected from their elderly friends and relatives, since they are now learning the history and architecture of their own town. They now know where the wagon yards, livery stables, saloons, boarding houses, and first homes were located. Ultimately, their research helped in the development of a "walking tour" of the historic downtown area.

Through it all, the students recognize that their work in a school project has grown into a significant contribution to their own community. These students now appreciate and believe our service learning motto, "My History is America’s History," because they have seen firsthand how their personal history connects with the history around them.

"There was never enough water. We were given a little Vienna Sausage-type can with a stick handle. This was our water cup and our meal cup. One night, after we stopped walking, it was very dark. After lining up for water, (one cup being all we could have) we realized we could crawl to the back of the line in the dark and go through the line again. I went through the line three times. If we had been caught, we would have been killed right there.

"Over the next three months, another 5,000 Americans and 20,000 Filipinos died from dysentery and starvation. We were taken in boxcars–packed in just like sardines–by rail to another larger camp. Working to move large buildings by hand, by putting huge timbers under them, soldiers were beaten with pick handles and clubs if any of us didn’t move fast enough or get the building just like they wanted. I was in this camp until 26 March 1944.

"When we arrived in Osaka on April 17, 1944, it was snowing. We had left the warm tropics of the Philippines and then almost froze to death in Japan. A train then took us to a mining camp ninety miles north of Tokyo. We worked in a copper mine three thousand feet underground. We worked nights, with snow about knee deep outside; the heat was so bad inside the mine that we worked in our underwear. We were fed rations of boiled milo maize and a small piece of fish. If a fellow was sick, he got two little bowls of this boiled maize. Soldiers were often beaten or beheaded for stealing food. We worked there until we didn’t know how long we could last. They expected us to get out as many carloads of copper a day as possible. We also had to make nails out of cables.

"One night, an interpreter came in and said, ‘the war is over.’ The Japanese locked us in the camp and left. About a week later, the Americans air-dropped food, shoes, and clothes for the soldiers in fifty-gallon drums. In the early fall of 1946, I came home to San Antonio, Texas.

"The night I got there, I tried to call home and no one answered. I stepped out of the phone booth and looked up and there stood my mother, my father, and my wife. I was never so glad to see anybody in my life."

Note: Read more about teaching genealogy in the classroom from the May/June 2001 issue of Ancestry Magazine.

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