{"id":228794,"date":"2025-05-13T07:15:57","date_gmt":"2025-05-13T11:15:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=228794"},"modified":"2025-10-24T08:57:30","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T12:57:30","slug":"using-theirstory-to-help-tell-our-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2025\/05\/using-theirstory-to-help-tell-our-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"Using TheirStory to Help Tell Our Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

UConn professor and Associate Director of Africana Studies, Fiona Vernal, is making strides to preserve oral histories from Connecticut communities using a platform called TheirStory<\/a>.<\/p>\n

TheirStory is an oral history platform and was created during the pandemic. CEO Zack Ellis founded the company as a way to preserve his own family histories.<\/p>\n

The platform has grown since its inception and is supported by a nationwide network of universities and historical organizations from UConn to UCLA. It has features to take people through every step of the process of oral history preservation. Users can record, transcribe, index, organize and more to tailor and share their oral histories.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are many, many ways that you can record. Recording has never been the problem when it comes to collecting stories. It\u2019s always what happens after you record,\u201d says Vernal.\u00a0 \u201cHow do you transcribe it? How do you share it? How do you produce it? How do you package it for preservation? TheirStory fits into that ecosystem by providing the last 50% of the miles that you need for processing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vernal began working with Ellis and TheirStory in 2022. She was working on a project in Hartford on West Indian, African American, and Puerto Rican migrations to the city and received a call from Ellis. \u201cI had been doing oral histories, but experiencing the same bottlenecks as everyone does,\u201d says Vernal. \u201cI ran my oral histories through TheirStory, and I was a convert immediately.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI had a vision for how to share this resource with other folks who were doing the same kind of work,\u201d Vernal says. \u201cIf you don\u2019t have a good way to process and generate a transcript, an index and a summary, it\u2019s very difficult to do anything. And it was my mission to try and change that landscape.\u201d<\/p>\n

A State with Many Stories to Tell\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Vernal and UConn began a partnership with Connecticut Humanities<\/a> a year later. Vernal scaled her use of the platform from a personal level to a statewide collaboration between UConn, Connecticut Humanities, and the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things that the UConn strategic plan does is that it forces us, as faculty, to figure out what statewide service we can provide to citizens,\u201d Vernal says. \u201cAs a state entity, we owe it to the citizens, right? I take it as a serious charge and responsibility that UConn should be benefiting the state.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vernal credits Connecticut Humanities for helping expand her individual license as a researcher into a state license for anyone in Connecticut. The Connecticut Museum of Culture and History also helped expand this program into a statewide initiative, \u201cNot just in terms of visibility, but also in terms of service,\u201d says Vernal.<\/p>\n

The Connecticut Museum of Culture and History had a COVID-era oral history project about the impact of the pandemic on the state. \u201cThey were at the beginning of a new oral history project that was more expansive, and not just focused on COVID, so it made sense for them to be our partners as well,\u201d Vernal says.<\/p>\n

The state license for oral history gives everyone in the state free access to the platform. It gives museums, libraries, students, community organizations and more the ability to learn more and utilize information on oral histories around the state.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

One of the pilot projects UConn and Vernal worked on included an oral history project for the Connecticut River Museum\u2019s 50th<\/sup> anniversary. Another was for the Mather Homestead in Darien, \u201cWhich involves a house museum connected to the Mather lineage of Increase and Cotton Mather<\/a> in the 1600s,\u201d says Vernal. The Mather family donated their home to become a museum, and they wanted to gather oral histories of the family for the archives.<\/p>\n

Vernal also worked with the Windsor Historical Society, \u201cwhich was looking at African American civic engagement in the town of Windsor, and also celebrating its own hundredth anniversary,\u201d Vernal says.<\/p>\n

Connecticut is rich in both history and communities with rich traditions, as the projects Vernal has been involved with demonstrate. At the Enfield Historical Society, there is an exhibition about African American Heritage. In Bloomfield, an exhibit on the town’s African American, Jewish, and West Indian heritage will premiere in October 2025. The Caribbean Heritage Museum will open in October to overlap with Founders Day at the West Indian Social Club of Hartford.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are my longest-running collaborators,\u201d says Vernal. \u201cI\u2019ve been collaborating with them since I was in graduate school, and they\u2019re going to lend me a segment of the club to transform it into a permanent gallery for a Caribbean Heritage Museum. Folks can come and have that experience and figure out why Connecticut has West Indians as the largest foreign-born population.\u201d\u00a0 It will be the first Caribbean Heritage Museum in the Northeast.<\/p>\n

‘History is Unfolding Now’<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since activating the state license for the platform, Vernal and UConn have reported 107 projects signed up on TheirStory. Of those, about 50% are active, which means that people working on those stories are actively doing interviews and processing oral histories. \u201cWe thought we would get 50, and we\u2019ve more than doubled that,\u201d says Vernal. \u201cFor me, that\u2019s been a resounding success.\u201d<\/p>\n

For people who want to share their own stories, Vernal describes the process as \u201cfrictionless.\u201d \u201cIf you know how to use Zoom, then the barriers to entry are very low,\u201d she says. \u201cYou get a link, curate your background for lighting and make sure you look the way you want to look, and then you can focus on being the center of attention for the moment without having to worry about controls.\u201d The people at TheirStory and UConn take care of all the logistical matters, while participating individuals are only responsible for sharing their history.<\/p>\n

Vernal is not worried about people fabricating their stories on the platform. \u201cMy mantra is that everyone is an expert in their own life story,\u201d she says. \u201cThey might not be an expert into the statistical significance of their experiences, but they\u2019re certainly an expert in their own life experiences and their own emotions.\u201d<\/p>\n

The access to these stories is something Vernal is excited about. \u201cWe have the State Historical Society, which is well-staffed, and then we have something like the Wintonbury Historical Society, which is all volunteer. So organizations that are poorly staffed or well-endowed can all use this platform and move forward with building up their collection,\u201d says Vernal. \u201cI like that leveling effect, because that\u2019s what investment in infrastructure should do. It should make it possible that no matter what your entry point is, no matter what your size is, you\u2019re getting the skills, training and software that you need to be successful in your specific mission. Whether you\u2019re the kid who wants to interview your parent or you are the organization that wants to do 500 oral histories, you both get exactly what you need to be successful.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to make the official case for oral histories as a way to build inclusive collections that help you document the ‘now.’ UConn has a tradition of robust support for oral history; this is part of our roots and our heritage,\u201d says Vernal. \u201cOrganizations are obsessed with documents from the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s and the 1900s. History is unfolding now, we\u2019re living through historic times now. We need to document these stories in real time, and oral histories can do that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

UConn’s Fiona Vernal is helping CT communities collect oral histories with the aid of a new online platform <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":228795,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,1715,2460,2192,2193,2650,2196,2235,2227],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1902],"class_list":["post-228794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-community-impact","category-faculty","category-fairfield-county","category-hartford-county","category-blue-impact","category-middlesex-county","category-today-homepage","category-uconn-edu-homepage"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-24 14:21:08","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228794"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":237020,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228794\/revisions\/237020"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/228795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228794"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=228794"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=228794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}