Family Story Workshops Online

There are many ways to tell and share family stories. Here's a starting point.

Friends, I’m excited to unveil the Family Stories Project: three online family story workshops Beginning, Middle & End which will run in late May and June 2024 for Australian and NZ timezones. Bookings open at 12 noon AEST, Monday 29th April 2024 via my website. [note: this event is over now but there’ll be more to come later this year]

If you are not in an Australia-friendly time-zone, never fear! Please read on as there is something for everyone.

On Monday 29 April 2024 you’ll receive an email with a link to the booking site as soon as it goes live. You can read all the details about the three workshops - which I’m leading - and I can’t wait for you to join one of my small groups.

The Backstory

In December 2023 I conducted a series of in-person family story workshops in regional Australia to engage communities ahead of my Lost in Shanghai 2024 Tour. Those initial workshops, developed in collaboration with the wonderful Contemporary Asian Australian Performance (www.caap.org.au), were not about teaching people skills to become genealogists. There are already plenty of societies, local history groups, libraries and associations where you can learn how to search records, physical archives and digital collections.

My passion is turning stories (written and recorded), images, documents and keepsakes into bite-sized projects: as they say, from little things, big things grow. After more than three decades in journalism, storytelling is my strength and my love. I’ve met many people who commit to writing a family history or life story but find the process overwhelming. With Beginning, Middle & End I want to show you how to collect and share your stories from the very first workshop, using exciting tools I’ve developed. I’m also keen that you gather living stories first; in other words, use the people around you while they are still able to tell their stories. Mine your past and tap into the stories of grand-parents, partners, parents, siblings, children and relatives.

The best family stories are the ones that you have, rather than the stories that you plan to take down one of these days.

There are too many half-completed family stories lying around in bottom drawers or somewhere up in the Cloud. Now is the time to dust-off them off; to turn them into projects using the tools from my Family Stories Project Beginning, Middle & End series.

Why shareable?

Have you ever thought about how different your life is to a compared to a child born in 2010? Did you go to a school in a small town with two teachers or did you ride to school - on a horse? Did you grow up in a colony or a place that has changed beyond recognition? What was life like before the Internet? What was the food you ate like? Did your grandparent tell you stories about relatives that you’ve never written down? There are so many reasons to scatter ‘crumbs’ for the people, our loved ones, who will come after us.

I want to show you this fabulous story about childhood created by one of my workshop participants Kush Kuiy, an artist and second generation Australian with South-Sudanese roots:

Story: “Me Then” ©Kush KT Kuiy

AND… if you want to sample my workshop series, I am partnering with the fabulous

Projectkin Community Forum

to deliver a 1 hour taster workshop on Friday 10th May 2024 at 9 am AEST or Thursday 9th May at 4 pm PT and 7 pm ET.

This is a free workshop but you must register (click on the image).

If you have any questions so far, please contact me. Otherwise all will be revealed very soon. Please spread the word and keep an eye out for my email on Monday and I hope to see you online!