Onward with Collecting More Interviews
Dear Voices of the Chesapeake Bay project lovers;
Well, I know it’s about time to get the Voices website back up and running. We had a website created with Frontpage 2000, which tells you approximately how long ago that was. Admittedly, I was lax in paying for the old website domain name (voicesofthechesapeakebay.org). So now we’ve got a new web address, which is “voicesofthechesapeakebay.net”. If you’re curious about what the old site looked like you can, amazingly enough, still bring it up by visiting the “Wayback Machine - and search there for Voices of the Chesapeake Bay.” Pretty cool. I’m just learning how to build a website with Square Space. It’s a process, so bare with me as I come to terms with the new proceedures. I’m working with a nice template, so some of the bones were laid out in advance, leaving me to fill in the pages with original content. No shortage there.
The Voices of the Chesapeake Bay project began in 2000 and that makes it about twenty-one years old now. My latest estimate of how many interviews have been collected stands at approximately 665! So we’ve covered a lot of miles, worn out a couple of VWs, and, sadly, seen a few of the older interviewees (and some all too young ones as well) depart from this mortal coil.
There is an effort underway to archive as many of the Voices interviews as possible over the next couple of years. I’ll need to find funding in order to make this a full time effort. All the while I intend to keep recording new interviews, in addition to filling in at times with “The Best of the Voices.” I lost my fulltime day job during the Covid meltdown. I’d been teaching interviewing workshops in “oral history” at lovely Washington College in Chestertown on the Eastern Shore. I’d love to get back to some of that teaching, if I can convince a few folks in academia here in the Annapolis region about the benefits of “Doing Oral History.” The process of deciding who to interview, planning the visits and knocking on doors, sharing the interviews with the public, and preserving them for posterity, research, and families to share amongst themselves, is a very valuable skills and esteem builder for young and older folks alike. There are so many assets and approaches to collecting interviews. I’ve seen it build self-confidence, turn a “happy to meet you” encounter into sharing an understanding about career paths, crisscrossing generations, and providing an awesome way to step back into our past with an eye toward grasping the longer view of the future.
Another wonderful thing I’ve noticed is that even the older interviews stand up nicely when replayed, rather than feeling outdated. The goal of the VOC project is to preserve the actual voices. It’s a good feeling to know that, even after all these years, we can revisit or enjoy for the first time a myriad of voices from the epic Chesapeake Bay watershed.
I’m excited about the new interviews posted to this website. Thanks for your support and to all those that have contributed to the very vital and alive project which is Voices of the Chesapeake Bay!