“Watch her carefully, every movement, every gesture, every little peculiarity: keep the camera whirring; for this is a film you’ll run over and over again (Gar Private from Brian Friel’s Philadelphia Here I Come)”.

The above line in Philadelphia Here I Come has come to my mind a lot over the last couple of months with the several people I have interviewed and written about. Of course, I have been affected emotionally from the life stories I have listened to and engaged with in my writing. However, I have thoroughly enjoyed my adventures todate. I like being an explorer of my own doorstep.

There is great scope in the use of oral history in exploring the human heart of any area. Many of my interviews are conducted at first contact with people and I am indebted to the countless strangers I have met willing to impart their story over the hundreds of Kimberly Mikados I have had. That being said, I rarely have analysed in depth what the participants have said. I try to let the stories do the talking. This paper is not an appropriate forum to do that. Hence this article is a gentle reflection of what I discovered. It is also based on recent work I am delving into for a PhD I have just started in the Department of Geography in UCC and discussions with the Northside Folklore Project based at St. Finbarr’s College, Farranferris, Cork.

On my interview in the last two weeks with John Manning, Inishleena, Inniscarra, Co. Cork, he imparted a vast amount of information about his life experiences. His account was full of nostalgia. He talked a lot about tradition and past ways of life, ways he cherished and now linger in his mind as memories. He talked much about changes in his life but narrated it by referring to time, using on several occasions statements such, ‘when I was a child’, ‘in my twenties’, ‘when we got married’, ‘on my ninetieth birthday’. That way of narrating the story revealed also the layers of his life, that his life did not all happen on one day but continues on. He was not born, married and age over one day. As a read recently, time just flows on but the undercurrents can change. I think sometimes we rarely reflect on the time (temporal) dimension in history.

At 91, John is good health but partially deaf. However, both John and I negotiated a way through our conversation. Both of us found a way through the mire of understanding between the writer, the interviewer, aged 30, and John who is 91. It is generally agreed that oral history is created in a recorded interview setting, using a structured and well-researched interview outline, with a witness to or a participant in a historical event. I have found recording people difficult and even some people see it as intimidating. So much of what I record is by hand written notes but using photographs of the people to provide some sense of the person to the reader.

I have found the use of oral history is a great window to the past and in doing so history has come very much alive for me. It reminds all of us that the participants, the interviewer and interviewee are real people, each with a unique perspective on the past and present. Exploring many sides of an issue through multiple first hand accounts offers the opportunity to uncover and insights into how people understand and interpret the past and their place in it. Oral history has a reliance on memory rather than texts. For each individual, our way of life, personality, our consciousness, our knowledge, our knowledge are directly built out of our past life experience.

Oral history is as old as history itself. In pre literate societies, everything had to be remembered, crafts and skills, the time and season, the sky, territory, law and speeches, transactions and bargains. In modern times, oral history has developed as a sub discipline of history but via the oral narrative historians have been brought into contact with other fieldwork disciplines such as sociology, anthropology or dialect or folklore research.

Oral history can help document previously undocumented information about communities, organizations, businesses, events or the lives of individuals. The interview allows researchers to probe beneath the surface of the written record. One can discover not just what happened but how and why, to explain anomalies, to provide convincing evidence or clues that enhance understanding of a past time and place. In my own opinion, the live experience creates understanding and makes the most telling and thought-provoking local history. At a basic level, interviewing can bring together people from different social classes and age groups who would otherwise rarely meet, let alone get to know each other closely.