About Charity

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

~George Eliot

With the help of my mother and younger brother, I conducted my first oral history interview at the age of 9 with my Grandma Helen. We used a rented VHS recorder with no tripod or microphones, so the audio is terrible and the picture is blurry. My brother’s artful zooms in and out are charming but slightly nauseating, and the flow of the interview is pretty wild, with a question about my Grandma’s favorite color being followed immediately by a question about her grandfathers’ experiences in the American Civil War. Despite its shortcomings, the footage is priceless.

I have always been interested in stories. I remember the excitement of going to the library as a small girl, checking out the maximum allowed number of books, and reading into the night. I remember learning about my grandmother’s father, who wrote stories about community members for the newspaper in the small mountain town in which he and his wife raised my grandmother and her siblings. I marveled over his writings as “Uncle Abe,” many written in strange-looking mountain dialect, and now preserved in book format. During visits with my grandparents, I pored over photo albums, asking who people were, eager to hear stories about them. My dad’s mother collected brochures and postcards from the places she visited, and I looked at them in wonder, running my fingers over the aged paper, considering the journeys that had brought these mementos to my Grandma Carrie’s scrapbooks.

In college and graduate school, I studied sociology using qualitative research: how better to understand people than to interview them? While finishing my dissertation, I was lucky enough to get a part-time job at Emory’s organization for retired faculty members. The stories the retired faculty members (and their loved ones) told taught me a great deal about the school I attended, my academic department, and the city of Atlanta. They also taught me about how best to live my own life, and pitfalls to avoid if possible.

Most importantly, they taught me to always look deeper if I really want to know someone, to take the time to listen to as many stories as possible, and to expect to be surprised at the resilience and strength of those I meet.

Since that time, I have also worked with older adults at non-profit organizations in San Francisco, CA, and Durham, NC. My greatest joy has always come from talking to these older adults about their lived experiences, and understanding how they experienced both small-scale family and community history and wide-scale social change.

I am passionate about helping older adults tell their stories and preserve their legacies for their loved ones and for society at large. We can learn so much about ourselves if we only take the time to consider and tell our stories, and we can learn so much from each other if we only listen.

I have been taking courses at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke since 2019, and received my certification from the Birren Center for Guided Autobiography to teach Guided Autobiography (GAB) courses in 2019. I have been teaching GAB courses virtually since 2020 and continued to be inspired by the stories shared by participants in each class.

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about GAB, recording services, or anything else. I would love to help you tell your story!