Modern historians have a wide range of resources at their disposal. Books, newspaper articles, digital media and more are easily accessible at the click of a button. Odds are, if you want to learn about a well-known historical event or topic, you can find hundreds, if not thousands of resources from the comfort of your own home.
Despite this wealth of knowledge, there is one type of resource that is exceedingly valuable and often difficult to collect: oral history. Oral history is a method of collecting and preserving historically important primary source material through recorded interviews. Many institutions are collecting these unique and personal accounts of history to enrich our understanding of past events.
These events could have taken place last week, last year or 80 years ago, as long as there is someone alive to tell their story. Currently, the Cayuga Museum of History & Art and Seymour Library are working in partnership on the "Voices of Cayuga County" oral history collection project. A primary goal of this work is to highlight individuals from groups that have been historically underrepresented, such as our Black, Latino/a and LGBTQ+ communities.
All completed interviews are available online on the New York Heritage Digital Collections website . As part of the Cayuga Museum’s ongoing work to create a permanent exhibit about the history of Cayuga County, we have also begun collecting oral histories specific to 20th and 21st century events. The types of questions .
