By Daisy Roberts
I started volunteering for Una Gan a Guna in March 2021 after attending a (virtual) lecture on oral history interviewing skills delivered by Ruth Beecher, the Project Lead. Ruth’s lecture emphasised the importance of oral history as a means for capturing and recording the experiences of people who have not always been included in histories of wars, politics, and leaders, such as the working classes, women and people of colour. She also highlighted how oral history projects allow interviewers to capture the stories of their own communities, cultures and families, as Una Gan A Guna does. As a history student, I’m very invested in contributing to a historical record that values and includes the histories of every community and as such was very excited to get involved.
Not having a familial connection to Ireland myself, I have primarily been involved in the project from an administrative angle and I have gained a lot of useful experience working on transcripts, producing interview summaries and completing catalogue documentation prior to interviews being submitted to the archive. I have also worked on administrative documents such as the Style Guide for Transcribing, which aims to help other volunteers produce consistent and accurate interview transcripts, and the Una Gan A Guna Business Plan, which has allowed me to gain insight into the project’s short, medium, and long-term goals and plans for achieving them.
Most challenging, due to my limited technological know-how, has been working on developing the website to include more information about the project, how to get involved and to share snippets of the histories of the women already interviewed. I have enjoyed getting to grips with managing content via Squarespace and have found working with the stories and images of women who have participated in the project incredibly interesting. As the project focuses on the lives of Irish women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, it provides an often very detailed snapshot into someone’s life at an incredibly formative stage as well as an idea of how the world at the time shaped their experiences. Many of the interviews are also completed by family members of the subjects, so it is really captivating to hear daughters, granddaughters, sisters or nieces hear the full version of stories they might have heard extracts of throughout their lives and get to relate to their family member in a new way or on a different level.
