You Telling Stories?

Are you gathering with families and hearing (priceless) stories? What about this?

Who’s telling stories with you?

Elizabeth Lanning, like many members of her family, got to know her grandfather on the flight deck of a rebuilt 1965 Cessna as he taught her how to fly.

She heard about his travels across six continents, including the time he flew to Hawaii in a single-engine plane using cloud formations to guide him and the time he crashed in the Amazon and survived in the jungle for a week.

The Silver Spring, Md., native wanted to turn her now 84-year-old grandfather’s stories into a book. But there never seemed to be enough time during breaks from graduate school. So she talked to her parents and the family decided to hire a professional filmmaker and historian to document his experiences.

“Memories fade,” said her father, James Richard Lanning. “I thought it would be a neat thing for our children’s children to be able to hear Pop tell these stories himself.”

A growing number of families are turning to professionals to record their family stories, employing “personal historians” to sit and ask the open-ended questions they don’t have time to ask during the rush of holiday gatherings or the sporadic bursts of long-distance communication.