They say that when a senior citizen dies, an entire library of information dies with them, which is why the Bermuda Maritime Museum has organised the Oral History Programme.

Leondra Burchall started collecting oral histories for the museum as a volunteer. She has watched the oral history project grow into a wide sweeping programme and is no longer a volunteer, but director of oral histories.?I am here for the historical research aspect, rather than the museum side,? she said. ?I love research.

?When you find a piece of information it?s a kind of rush. I love discovering something. I also enjoy putting the personal side into history. People often times think it?s really boring or really dry. When you put the human side into it, and the experiences, it brings history to life and makes it more relevant and more interesting to readers and the general population. That is what I am trying to do for my field.?

The Oral History Programme at the museum is now a part of the historical research division, and it is another way to collect primary source information. The information is kept onsite at the museum to be used for exhibits, books and articles.

Overall, Mrs. Burchall has interviewed between 50 and 60 people for the museum, many of them war veterans. Last month she interviewed John Seward, an elderly English visitor to the Island who was stationed here during the Second World War to set up radar equipment at the Royal Naval Dockyard.

?His information greatly adds to the Defence Heritage collection and exhibit,? said Mrs. Burchall.

?We started doing oral histories for the defence heritage collection. Those oral histories are now incorporated into the actual exhibits,? she said. ?Now we are trying to go back and get all of the ones we didn?t get.?

The Oral History Programme is actually closing up with the war veteran interviews and is planning to move on to a new project, interviewing people involved with the Commissioner?s House.

?It is the fifth anniversary of the Commissioner?s House opening,? said Mrs. Burchall. ?We are going to be doing a major project regarding that as far as a documentary and a journal magazine issue.

?We are interviewing anyone who had anything to do with Commissioner?s House. It was used for different things at different times.?

Mrs. Burchall wants to hear from anyone who has any recollections of Commissioner?s House, worked in it, or took part in its restoration.

?It wasn?t in commission for a long time,? said Mrs. Burchall. ?It was used up until the Second World War. I have access to people who were stationed here. They know the layout of the house and what room was used for what. We also want to hear from people who worked on it to bring it back to its present day condition.?

The interviews are videotaped rather than written down. Transcribing takes up too much of the museum?s energy and resources. Any historian wishing to use the material must view the videotape and take their own notes. This may change in the future.

?We have moved to digital video recording as opposed to strictly audio,? she said. ?The equipment is a learning curve, because I am not a videographer by trade. We have a volunteer here who went to film school. For the larger projects she is going to be helping me do the interviews. Prior to her volunteering it was just me.?

Mrs. Burchall gained experience conducting oral histories this way while researching her doctoral degree history dissertation at Kent State in Ohio. She has an undergraduate and masters degree in history from Howard University in Washington D.C. .

?That was maybe six years ago,? she said. ?You sit in front of a VCR and you take your own notes. It makes the researcher responsible for getting the information that they want, as opposed to the institution. We are very small and transcribing takes a lot of time.

?It is either we spend our time transcribing or we spend our time doing the interviews and collecting the information.?

The oral histories are taken down under very strict guidelines to make them more useful to researchers.

?It is history,? she said. ?So historical information has to be written out in a certain format, because we are looking for certain information and information that they have and willing to show us.

?It is not like a conversation where you speak about what you know. It is more geared to questions like ?What role did you play at Commissioner?s House???

All of the people interviewed for a certain project are asked the same questions.

?That is how you are able to use it as a primary source and check it against secondary sources,? she said. ?Part of being an oral historian is knowing how to bring out the information.?

If interviewees ask anything that wasn?t on the questionnaire it is added in a special section at the end.

?History is a trained profession,? said Mrs. Burchall. ?We take it very seriously at the museum. That is why the oral histories are part of the actual infrastructure now. There are still things that have to be put together and analysed with other data.?

She said the length of time that an oral history takes depends mostly on the person being interviewed.

?It runs the gamut,? she said. ?There are people that are very chatty and will talk for hours, and then there are others who are only a 15 or 20 minute interview. We all know what happened during the war, we all know that Commissioner?s House was restored; it is about getting the human side.?

She said no matter how long an interview takes, they can still provide something useful.

Mrs. Burchall is originally from Youngstown, Ohio. She became interested in oral histories while working on her dissertation.

?I needed some oral history,? she said. ?Then I worked on a longitudinal study in sociology. All we did was interviews. I honed my skills. That is how I eventually came here. The museum sponsored me to come as a volunteer.?

Her particular interest is urban history. Her dissertation is a community study on African Americans in her hometown of Youngstown, Ohio.

?It is a migration study of a small city as opposed to a larger city,?she said. ?It covers areas like politics, church, settlement and the reasons they came to work and the community they developed once they arrived.

?Bermuda is not really an urban environment because it is an island, however there are similarities in Bermuda to urban environments,? she said. ?An area of interest of mine is to do comparative studies similar to the US and Bermuda in different aspects.

?Bermuda has a small town way. It is a real community like I imagine my grandmother and my mom?s home town. On the other hand, you do have the overcrowding, and the businesses in Hamilton and the traffic that you have in an urban environment. It is sort of a mixed bag, in my opinion.

When she is finished her dissertation she would like to write a book, but it is sometimes difficult for her to find the time.

?I don?t have a good writing routine,? she said. ?I find time when I can. I have a husband and three children and a job. If I can I get in any time at home, but it is not a consistent thing.?

Mrs. Burchall is married to John Burchall and she has a son and two stepdaughters. She tries to bring a love of history to her household.

?I don?t think he will become a historian, but he will know his history,? she said, referring to her son.

?It is important for each person to know their history. Family history is one way. If it is just passed down from generation to generation that is still empowering. That is what I am trying to do with my children.?

She said the Ministry of Education is making great strides in introducing more Bermuda history to the curriculum.

?They have revamped the social history component,? she said. ?It is really important that Bermuda history is taught in Bermuda. Lots of people have come up to me and said they still don?t know lots of things about the country in which they live. That is unfortunate. The good side is that they are trying to change it for this generation of children.?