I have been a Civil Funeral for six years now, and during that time I have heard, and then got to tell, the most incredible stories. Those stories all paint a picture, of what it has been like to live in our world for the last one hundred years. Some people have achieved incredible things, for others a simple life is all they needed.
What each of those stories does, is to add different layers to one huge story. They enable me to see how our lives overlap, how pupils from the same school, or street, went on to lead very different lives. Over the years, when I have delivered services for different family members, I have been able to see how their lives have entwined or separated.
This rich tapestry of information will be lost within a couple of generations. After all, in my lifetime we have moved from cine film to video to DVDs to memory sticks, and I am as guilty as the next person of throwing away old videos, or not managing to move everything across to a new laptop. Word of mouth changes information too, so those stories we remember from our grandparents won’t always be passed on accurately to our own children – if at all.
It became obvious, that the stories that I share each week deserved to be saved, so I set myself the task of trying to find a way to do that. I began by approaching the main archives… places like the National Archives and the Bodleian Library, but had no joy, so I moved on to exploring other possibilities.
Each time I talked about my idea, I was met with such positive responses. Even those who couldn’t help me were so supportive. “These sound like an amazing social record, and the way your work has been impacted by the pandemic will surely be a topic of research for many future students and scholars.” “I was very interested to hear of your profession as Funeral Celebrant and fascinated to hear about your collection of funeral scripts. They sound extremely interesting, and brought to mind a type of document from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany, the 'Leichenpredigt' (funeral sermon) which have been used by social historians to understand more about early modern lives.”
Responses like these, gave me hope that my idea wasn’t quite so hare-brained, and I carried on talking about it to as many people as possible. I had sent my first email in January 2021, and then in 2022 I delivered a service for a lady, whose partner, Paul, is a Reader in the Department of Linguistics and Communication at the University of Birmingham, and at the end of our meeting we happened to talk about funeral scripts, and I mentioned my hope to save the stories that I tell ...
Fast forward to April 2023, when Paul came onboard, and the project grew wings. A very wonderful friend (www.beyondthepen.co.uk) kindly created our logo (and came up with the name) and the Life in Words Project was born.
There has been a huge amount of work behind the scenes, just to get us to where we are now. That began with me approaching a random selection of the families I have supported, with a request to use their person’s script in the initial set up phase.
We received overwhelming support, and those scripts have enabled us to better understand what we need to do to launch the project, how to extract the data, and how beneficial the scrips will be to a huge variety of students and academics, alongside family historians.
Paul was able to provide some initial funding, which meant that we could employ a researcher to so some groundwork on the scripts and we have slowly been edging our way towards being able to launch.
Our next biggest step is to secure the funding. We hope to be able to employ two researchers for eighteen months, and aim to hold five thousand scripts, but we hope that that will just be the starting point.
Paul has secured a permanent place for the scripts, once the project ends, as it was important to us both that the scripts will always remain searchable. So, huge thanks to the Oxford Text Archive for agreeing to protect them for generations yet to come.
So, where do we go from here…. Well, you will just have to check back in for the next update to find out!