Here’s a career you don’t often see touted at high school career days: Professional personal historian.
I’ve known of companies and non-profits who hire a historian to document their feats of derring-do, but this is the first I’ve heard of a personal historian. Dan Curtis appears to be trying to make a career out of it.
It’s counterintuitive, but it might work. As lawyers, we see a lot of people who would rather hide their histories than have them known more broadly. But in the public relations game, we see professionals helping to polish the image and the stories of organizations and people. Why not do it for yourself?
Perhaps, with professional help, you can find the narrative of your own history that will give you the hope, tenacity and guts to change your life for the better?
Seriously, check out the guy’s site. He proposes several solutions for problems we have all faced — capturing history from terminally ill relatives, will-making, resolving end-of-life concerns, and simply recording the family history for posterity.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
Thanks Ed. I hadn’t thought about the legal benefits of a personal history. I’ll do a post on the subject one of these days. Always looking for good ideas.
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Thanks for dropping by, Dan.
I laughed out loud when I stumbled on your site, but it made a lot of sense after a little reflection. My mother’s family and my wife’s family are Mormon backgrounded, so we have a lot of family history books flying around. Some of them are fascinating, some of them are well-written, but often “fascinating” and “well-written” don’t come together in the same volume. It’s easy to see how some professional help would make the books much more appealing, and useful.
You might want to stress a little bit more the beneficial legal aspects of knowing the history of one’s family, at your website. Working due diligence on hundreds of sites around Texas, I often wished I were working with Mormons who had a written record of what their ancestors had done. Fortunes sometimes turn on such knowledge.
Good luck, and keep us posted on the business from time to time, will you?
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Ed,
Thank you for mentioning my personal history blog. I appreciate your comments. You may be interested to know that there are now over 600 members of the Association of Personal Historians. It’s a rapidly expanding field. Readers of your blog who might be interested in using the services of a personal historian can go to the Association’s site at: http://www.personalhistorians.org/ There they’ll be able to find a directory of members and someone who may live close by that can help them.
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