Pathways to Preserving Family Histories, with Basya Petnick

Click here to register for this free virtual event, co-presented by the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society.

The novel Kantika, based on Elizabeth Graver’s interviews with her grandmother, can be a stimulus to collect, organize, and preserve your own family history. This workshop will provide guidance for doing so. What photos and documents are available? Who is available to be interviewed? Basya Petnick will stimulate thinking about the stories behind the births, marriages, deaths, and migrations in your family, as well as the presentation forms that might work best—such as oral history, legacy letter, or ethical will—to help you move forward in creating a beautiful gift from the past to future generations.

Basya Petnick has been practicing oral history in the Bay Area and beyond for 35 years. She served as the co-director of the Legacy Oral History Program at the Museum of Performance + Design, and as director of the Alumni Memory Project of San Francisco Ballet. Working in partnership with the Oral History Center at UC Berkeley, she was invited to add several of her oral histories to their Bancroft Library Special Collections, including Gratefully Yours, an oral history of Rabbi Stephen Pearce, and Song and Spirit: A Cantor’s Life, an oral history of Roslyn Junever Barak. Her work has been honored by the award of several major grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the founder and principal of Books & Lives, a creator and publisher of oral histories and life stories.

Program made possible, in part, by Judy Baston.