Family history and oral historian

Photos: Left, James McKeown, my dad's grandpa, who came from Ireland in the mid-1800s to Ontario, Canada.

Right: My dad, Louis W. Lessard, bombardier with the 450th Bomb Group, Manduria, Italy.

I was born to be a family historian and oral historian. In the 1980s, I interviewed my grandparents about their young lives growing up in the late 1800s - early 1900s in the wilderness near Clare, Michigan. The resulting books were a labor of love since I prepared them on a typewriter! In the next few years, I hope to put them on the internet for the Michigan Gen. Web. project.

My grandmother's book, Andrine and Ole Larson and Family, (150 pages) is the story of her parents who came from Norway in the 1880s and settled near Clare, Michigan.

Before preparing my grandpa's oral history, I wrote a basic family history, The History of Our Kaul Ancestors, (350 pages) which begins in the mid-1600s in Deidesheim, Germany, and ends in the late 1800s in the Frankenmuth, Michigan area.

I finished my grandpa's oral history, The Childhood Memoirs of Earl Kaul (530 pages) in the early 1990s and it is my pride and joy. Grandpa had so many good stories!

Since then, I've done quite a bit of oral history on video, including my dad's WWII memoirs and both my parents memoirs of surviving the Great Depression and WWII, and once done with that, getting on with their lives--marrying, raising a family, and the fun they had with friends and relatives in the Clarkston, Michigan area.

More recently, I've worked on my dad's mother's Irish family, the McKeowns and Writts from Kinkora, near Stratford, Ontario.