Tell Your Story
There was a time when stories were passed down by word of mouth, when storytelling was an art that was celebrated, a form of entertainment, and a means of communicating information from one generation to the next.
Sadly, modern living has largely suffocated the tradition of verbal storytelling, and all too often our loved ones pass on before we think to ask questions about their lives, or listen very deeply to their memories. When we do hear snippets of lives gone by, the crowded space in our own memory banks and thought processes make it difficult to retain details, and we are unlikely to pass those glimmers of memories on.
It is believed that, generally, if family stories are not documented, they are lost within two generations.
Heather Thomson, from Tell Your Story, is adamant that this is a trend needing to be turned around, that these lives that have played and worked, loved and lost, learned and taught, and given and received, are enabled to live on past the physical, forming vital links down through future generations.
Tell Your Story is a memoir writing business, the seeds of which were sown in 2022 when Heather’s father died very suddenly. He was a man who was interested and interesting; he was curious about life on every level. A General Practitioner, Heather’s dad was passionate about anthropology and genealogy, and he and Heather’s mother spent several years providing medical care, and training nurses in Papua New Guinea, their first two children travelling there with them and their third and fourth born over there.
Heather is the youngest of the four children, and was only three years old when Nick and Jan decided to bring the family back to New Zealand, leaving her with only snapshot memories of their time in the tropics. It is fortunate that one of the other activities Nick enjoyed was writing, and well before his death he created a book documenting the family’s time in Papua New Guinea. Because of this, Heather’s memories have broadened dramatically, the text and photos within the book adding body and colour to the bones of her existing snapshots.
As a child Heather remembers being relatively bored about all but the most exciting aspects of the extensive family tree that her father spent years researching and compiling, before the days of Ancestry.com, reaching back to the 1700’s. She enjoyed his stories of distant relatives assisting in the escape of Bonny Prince Charlie from Culloden, but the rest made little impression on her. However, as an adult Heather was thrilled to design the covers of four historical novels written by Nick, spanning the centuries and the globe as they follow the family from the Isle of Skye in the 1700’s to the eventual move to Otago and life in New Zealand in the mid 1900’s. Nick had taken all the knowledge he had gleaned
through his family history research, added historical facts and events, and used his imagination to breathe life, energy and texture into his stories.
Topping the list of written work from her father, however, is Nick’s autobiography. Heather admits that, as a teenager, the thought of him writing this would have elicited from her a dramatic rolling of the eyes, but once an adult she felt quite differently. Reading about her father’s life, learning about his loves, hates, friends, family, school, faith, private thoughts, public celebrations was enlightening, leading naturally to learning also about life in New Zealand from early in the 1900’s through to when her father’s memories started to morph into her own.
As part of his rural General Practice, Nick regularly visited the old people in the area to check on them and, if possible, administer medical help without them having to make their way in to his surgery. Heather often went with him, and was fascinated by these amazing elderly people who lived vastly different lives to hers. Even then she loved the stories they told, imagining their days as children of her age. When Nick died very suddenly it was, understandably, a massive shock to the family, and as often happens there came the ‘I wish I’d asked him’ thoughts. This is when the books he left behind gained an extra-thick layer of importance for Heather. Because Nick had taken the time to document his life and experiences, very many of Heather’s questions have already been answered, the information at her fingertips within the pages of the books that her father produced.
“Dad’s books are like gold to me now. They have given me insight into the lives of those who came before me, excited me with adventures I could only have dreamed of, evoked memories of my own childhood that I had forgotten and offered perspective to others I’d remembered differently. Most importantly, they have created a tangible link to my father. It is this that has driven me to offer this service to others.” Over the months following her father’s death, the idea of writing others’ stories for them gained momentum, and in 2024 she launched her business.
“I have to earn a living, so it just makes sense to do something that I’m truly passionate about, providing a service that will enrich the lives of generation upon generation.” Heather says that there are many people who have seriously considered writing their memoirs, but figure they’ll wait until life gets a little slower. Sadly though, our days are not promised, Heather’s father is a prime example; had he waited till the pace of life had slowed she and her siblings would never have had the benefit of his books.
There are those who don’t believe their lives are interesting enough to document, but Heather explains that each of our stories is unique to us. Also, not only are they interesting to our loved ones, but they also hold valuable information about those who have gone before us. It is important to Heather that she preserves the memories of her clients by writing in their own style of speech, using the words and phrases they use, so that as their loved ones are reading, they can hear them speaking.
“Reading the story of an older family member brings joy, laughter and sometimes tears. But it does more than entertain – it offers an anchor to the past, creating familial bonds that provide a sense of belonging, an understanding of who we are and where we’re from. Not everyone is a writer, but everybody has a history that is like gold to their loved ones.”
