Sample Memoir
The following is an excerpt from an interview recorded with an Edmonton man who had worked as a bush pilot for 25 years in the Northwest Territories (now Nunavut) beginning in the early 1950s. Over the course of the interview he related a series of remarkable stories introducing some of the people and experiences that have shaped his life.
* Note: The images below are not page scans from a completed book, but rather illustrations to give an appreciation of layout.
This section of the finished memoir is supplemented with maps of the many places the pilot has flown:
Chesterfield Inlet (Inuktitut: Igluligaarjuk), is located on the western shore of Hudson's Bay in Canada's Nunavut Territory. The community is served by air and by annual supply sea-lift. The population is 345 according to the 2001 Census.
The memoir includes photographs of the places he describes:
Port Radium is located on Great Bear Lake. The mines were discovered in 1930 and yielded deposits of pitchblende, from which much radium was produced. During World War II the mines were expropriated by the Canadian government when scientists found that these ores contained a rich store of uranium oxide, a source of atomic energy. They were exhausted and closed in 1960.
Photographs of many of the airplanes he has flown throughout his career are also included:
Altogether there were 903 Norsemans built, beginning in November 1935. The last one was completed in 1959. They have been flown in, or over, 67+ countries in the world, plus the Arctic and Antarctic continents.
To provide context for his story, we compiled additional photographs and relevant details about the people and events he had described, and included them in the memoir. The combination of audio, images and contextual information provides the reader with a vivid and immersive account of this person’s life history.
Sound can provide a powerful link to the past, and listening to someone telling their own story conveys things about their personality that plain text cannot capture. For example, this client’s unique sense of humour was certainly apparent in the audio interview found below:
Please click on the following link to listen to this man’s account of working with Mr. Al Oming, a man who ran a local zoo in the North in the 1960s. In the following recording, P is the client, R is the interviewer from Memories To Memoirs, and H is a friend of P who assisted P in remembering some of the details of his account.
* Note: The following example has been compressed for space, and does not represent the audio quality of the actual recordings. All audio recordings accompanying our memoirs are of the highest archival quality.
Al Oming, Polar Bears And Other Animals
