Oral Histories

What is Oral History?

Four generations of an Elvington family outside their colliery house c.1930s.

Oral history can be defined as the collection of planned recorded interviews with individuals to collect personal stories and opinions. Oral histories often contain information not available in other historical forms, and can be used to preserve eyewitness accounts and first hand knowledge of events. They seek to add an additional personal dimension to historical research through the collection of the emotions and perceptions of ‘ordinary’ people whose experience would otherwise be largely unrecorded. These can be used to enrich written history with first person reminiscences, making history accessible and vital though the personal interpretation of events by those who lived through the experience.

Oral history can also be defined as the transmission of stories and traditions from one generation to the next. The archive also contains some examples of intergenerational transmission of the genealogical histories of participants and their communities.