Organizing a collection of personal records can be an interesting way to learn more about the past while preserving this material for the future. each item may have a story. asking questions as you work can you add notes and information that will allow people to understand more about the collection later on. pretend you are an older person organize his or her records. you find a box with the following items in it: a photograph of several young people in graduation caps and gowns, but no date or names. a handwritten recipe that is blurred and stained; at the bottom, you can make out a note containing the letters aun . . m . . choc . . a roadmap of the united states with several locations circled in red and a red line tracing the routes between them; when you look closely you can see that the line does not include any major highways. for each item, list three questions that ask who, what, why, when or where questions. there are no correct or incorrect questions to ask, but the more you work with primary sources, the more ways you will find of evaluating and analyzing them.

A personal history is one way of leaving a legacy for descendants to treasure for generations. It is important to retain accuracy of information when creating your personal history. If you leave it to someone else to create it, he or she can only rely on their memories of you and secondhand stories that may not accurately reflect your life.

The first thing to understand here is what a primary source is. Primary sources are basically any form of document, object, or recording that was created during the period of time in which an event, circumstance, or person, of interest, happened.

Some of these sources may be books, journals, pictures, albums, and other mementos that bring about the remembrance of a specific moment in time, and all of them spring directly from that time. In the case of this question we have a series of boxes containing items that belong to an older person and you wish to learn more about them, learn the history behind them. These items then become a primary source, but you need to research what they mean, especially if you are to organize them.

So in the first item, which is a graduation photo, but that has no dates or names for the people in them, there are three possible questions you may ask: 1. Was this taken during your high school graduation, or college graduation? 2. Are these you and your friends? 3. Where was this picture taken?

For the handwritten recipe, that is blurred, with the note at the bottom with just the letters AunMChoc, you could ask, 1. Do you know who wrote this recipe? 2. What was this recipe for? 3. What do these letters mean?

For the third item, the roadmap of the United States, you could ask things like: 1. Who did you go with on this trip? 2. Where did you intend to go, or did you just wish to visit all these sites? 3. When did you go on this trip?

Questions like these will prod the memory of the person you are working with and will give you further insight into the stories behind each of those memories.

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