Oral history records our stories, our knowledge, experiences, anecdotes, observations and achievements. Oral history collects the stories of ordinary people in their own words – the workers, the community, the clients, the onlookers: The people who were there when it happened.

Oral history brings out the richness, the humour, and the emotion of times past, and results in a wealth of recorded knowledge that otherwise may have been forgotten. The spoken word gives different information in a different style to the historical accounts that are based on written documents and academic research.

Remember those stories your  grandmother or great grandfather used to tell you? Or the yarns the old bloke who worked at the factory used to spin? That’s oral history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_history