Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
On The Trail Of Tales
Questers collect oral histories for Pryor Center
Lots of people have stories to tell about life in Northwest Arkansas, and lots of organizations collect those stories. But Connie Fetters and Camille Hatcher saw a hole in that tapestry of memories.
“In our work with Questers, we noted there were people’s stories being missed because they were not in the target audience of the organizations or [they] lived outside their collection area,” says Fetters. “In addition, we felt it would be beneficial if interviews could be archived and stored in a common place. We want the history collected to be able to be researched and enjoyed by a large audience.”
Questers, explains Fetters, is “an international organization that is dedicated to the preservation and restoration of historical objects and places.” But, she adds, “Questers also have a great interest in local history in the areas they are located.” When she moved to Northwest Arkansas nine years ago, Fetters ran across one of the four Questers chapters in the area and discovered it gave her “the opportunity to be involved in local preservation and restoration and local history.” As members of Questers, Fetters and her friends support the Kindley House in Gravette, the Gambell Cemetery in Centerton, the Rogers Historical Museum and the Bella Vista Historical Society. But their desire to make the oral histories they collected accessible to a wider audience led them to The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
“The Pryor Center provides digital audio kits, free of charge, to anyone who wants to record an interview with someone having a connection to Arkansas,” explains Susan KendrickPerry, operations manager and transcription supervisor. “In return, the interviewer and interviewee sign a donation release form authorizing the recording and any other related materials to become the property of The Pryor Center. The donated materials will be deposited and preserved forever in The Pryor Center archives. [And] after the materials are processed, they will be made available to the public on the Pryor Center website at pryorcenter.uark.edu.”
In addition, Kendrick-Perry says, to help the Questers get started, “we provided a half-day oral history workshop for members of their group interested in participating in their oral history project.”
“We are often asked why we collect oral histories instead of video interviews,” says Fetters. “We have decided on the oral route for a few reasons. One, our interviewers are all volunteer. It is fairly easy to teach someone to do an oral interview, and we can get quite a few accomplished this way. Finding volunteers to do visual interviews would be more difficult, editing would be more timeconsuming, etc. And two, we find that many of the people we interview are more comfortable doing an oral interview than they would doing a visual interview.
“Our criteria for participating in our interviews is that the narrator have a story to tell about Northwest Arkansas,” Fetters explains. “Many of our narrators have a lifelong history of living in Arkansas, but there is also a substantial group who may have lived in Northwest Arkansas for a number of years that have had a significant effect on what has occurred in the area and have a story to tell. We are collecting stories of ‘common folk.’”
The six Questers volunteers working regularly on the project have already completed 33 interviews.
“So far, our oldest narrator is 102, and our youngest is 70,” Fetters says. “Twenty-six of those we interviewed were over 80, and 13 of that group are more than 90 years old.”
Through a program March 25 at
the Rogers Historical Museum, the Questers “are hoping to make others in the community aware of the oral history collection we are doing. We have a current prospect list of over 40 people, and we are also hoping we may find a few volunteers who might enjoy working on collecting these stories as much as we do.”