By Pam Pacelli Cooper President,Verissima Productions It was the first day of my sophomore year in high school. I was opening my locker when I noticed a tall, rawboned girl next to me with a brilliant smile. “I’m Kathie,” she said. “Our friendship began at that moment. Though we live on different continents and live[Read More]
Life Preservers Blog
Photo, Photo, Who’s That in the Photo?
By Pamela Pacelli-Cooper President, Verissima Productions Incorporated Who takes the photos in your family? Do you have stacks and stacks of albums from past years, a Picasa or Flickr account with thousands of images, or do you stay away from taking photographs because it’s too much trouble? And what about photos from your[Read More]
Context, Context, Context: Personal Historians and American History
By Pamela Pacelli, Personal Historian President, Verissima Productions So you’re doing a personal history for someone and they want to write about their grandmother who was the first woman to vote in her tiny Kansas town. Or, you’re interviewing a 90-year-old man from Pennsylvania whose father fought in the First World War 100 years[Read More]
Palaces for the People: You and the Public Library
By: Pamela Pacelli President, Verissima Productions I was 7 years old and the huge grey building with its copper dome and tall, fluted columns seemed like one of the palaces I had read about in fairy tales. My mother and I walked through the heavy bronze door into a room with marble floors,[Read More]
Fabulous Women in Great Movies…
By Pam Pacelli Cooper Verissima Productions As Women’s History Month winds down, I think of all the marvelous, silly, gripping, and sometimes infuriating roles given to actresses over the years in the thousands of films I have seen. A list of some of my favorites follows (in no special order). 1. Who is[Read More]
“You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby”…but you’ve got a long, long way to go.
A post for Women’s History Month, 2015 By Pam Pacelli Cooper, Verissima Productions Many people are used to thinking about women’s struggles to gain equality and physical safety as a thing of the past. We see the statistics describing women’s rise to the top in corporations, in educational achievement, in politics, and in[Read More]
A Wider View
by Pam Pacelli Cooper Verissima Productions Today’s excerpt from the “Abbott Leonard Cohen Tapes,” recorded when he was 91 years old, provide a perfect example of the ways our perceptions can be altered when interviewing subjects or when reading diaries someone has left behind. For most of his life, Len Cohen’s grandson Rob believed that his[Read More]
5 Great Reasons to Love the Family History Library in Salt Lake City
Several years ago, the Association of Personal Historians held their conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, the Mecca of family history. While I was there I had the opportunity to visit the Family History Library. As RootsTech 2015, a large annual genealogical conference, kicks off in Salt Lake today, I thought I’d share 5 reasons to visit (and love) this fabulous[Read More]
Building a family history: Where to start?
By Pam Pacelli Cooper Verissima Productions My mother in law Polly died 5 years ago. Her dining room table is now ours, her bed is in our guest room, and we have kept the vow we made when we inherited some of her things to have more dinner parties and to fill our[Read More]
Dust in the Wind: Preserving that which will pass away
By Pam Pacelli-Cooper President, Verissima Productions I am returning to this blog after 18 months. As I was thinking about what to write, I came upon a short online essay by Christopher Cavin, a Zen monk and therapist who practices in Salt Lake City, the beating heart of genealogy in the United States. [Read More]
