know.

CookbookResearch and civic lifeNo. 49

An oral history collectioninterviews summarised, indexed and released with consent

Recipe No. 49 · Research and civic life

For: A volunteer cataloguing a town’s oral history interviews

You get: A document per interview, time-coded, quoted and indexed by name

Time: Twice each interview’s length to listen

See it in know.sh

Interview 7 as its public link shows it: the catalogue record, the narrator’s line set as a pull quote, and the time-coded segments below.

Quarry and mill voicesNo. 7

Interview 7Marjorie Tate: the quarry and the 1971 closing

16 sections, 4,120 words, about 18 minutes, filed 30 June 2025, revised 21 September, 4 highlights, shared.

Narrator. Marjorie Tate, born 1944, who lived on Quarry Road until 1990. Her father, Walter Tate, was a foreman at the Ellery quarry.

Recorded. 12 June 2025, at her kitchen table in Ellery Falls, by Paul Okafor, a society volunteer. 1 hour 6 minutes. Recording OH-2025-007, Ellery Falls Historical Society archive.

Release. Signed 12 June 2025, for public use, with one segment closed at the narrator’s request.

She talks about the quarry her father ran a crew in, the 1955 flood, the Congregational church and the year the quarry closed.

Sections

  1. 100:00:40 — Growing up on Quarry RoadObservationBorn in 1944 in the house her grandfather built; the quarry at the top of the road.
  2. 200:06:15 — Walter Tate’s crew at the Ellery quarryObservationHer father’s crew of eleven, most of them Italian, and the lunch pails she carried up.
  3. 300:14:20 — The quarry whistle and Quarry RoadObservationThe whistle at seven, noon and four; her father timing his walk home by it.
  4. 400:18:30 — Walking to the Main Street schoolObservation
  5. 500:22:05 — The flood of 1955 and the Hollis millObservation, key, 1 noteMrs Tate, then eleven, describes the night the Ellery River rose in August 1955.

and 11 more sections

One segment as a section, with its names and places and a proposed note where two narrators disagree on the flood’s date. The town and narrators are invented.

Quarry and mill voicesInterview 7

5of 16

00:22:05The flood of 1955 and the Hollis mill

Observation, key section, 1 highlight, 1 note, 312 words

Time. 00:22:05 to 00:31:40. Recording OH-2025-007, Ellery Falls Historical Society archive.

Summary. Mrs Tate, then eleven, describes the night the Ellery River rose in August 1955. Her father, a quarry foreman, went down to the Hollis mill to help move bolts of cloth to the upper floor. She remembers the water reaching the second step of the Congregational church, and the quarry closing for nine days while the men worked in town.

People. Walter Tate (her father); “Mr Hollis”, the mill owner, first name not given.

Places. Hollis mill; Congregational church, Main Street; Quarry Road.

Uncertain. She dates the flood to “the week after my birthday”, which would make it late August. Interview 12 puts it in mid-August.

The shelf’s index: each recurring name leads to every interview and segment it comes up in. Bold numbers are highlighted segments.

know., Index, C · Look up, New, ⋯

Index to Quarry and mill voices

Congregational to Tate

C

  • Congregational
    • Interview 7 — Marjorie Tate: the quarry and the 1971 closing, 5
    • Interview 12 — Frank Dube: the mill floor, 1948–1962, 3
    • Interview 19 — Ruth Kowal: teaching at the Main Street school, 2, 8

E

  • Ellery
    • Interview 3 — Leo Marchetti: the Italian quarrymen, 2, 6–7
    • Interview 7 — Marjorie Tate: the quarry and the 1971 closing, 2, 5, 9
    • Interview 14 — Walt Brennan: cutting stone on Quarry Road, 4, 6

H

  • Hollis
    • Interview 7 — Marjorie Tate: the quarry and the 1971 closing, 5
    • Interview 12 — Frank Dube: the mill floor, 1948–1962, 1, 4
    • Interview 26 — Anne Hollis: the family and the mill, 1–6

T

  • Tate
    • Interview 7 — Marjorie Tate: the quarry and the 1971 closing, 1, 2, 5, 9
    • Interview 14 — Walt Brennan: cutting stone on Quarry Road, 4

How it works

Your society has thirty-one recorded interviews and no way to find anything in them. You listen and take notes; your assistant turns them into a document per interview, with time-coded segments and one line in the narrator’s own words set large. Then the index does the rest: Hollis leads to every segment where the mill comes up.

  1. Listen and take notes

    Play each recording in the archive’s player. Every time the conversation turns, note the time code, the subject, the people and places. The recording itself stays in the archive.

  2. Have your assistant file the interview

    Give it your notes and the catalogue record. It makes the document: the record as the overview and one Observation section per segment, titled with its time code and subject.

  3. Set the narrator’s words at the head

    Type the best excerpts yourself as Evidence sections, then ask for a pull quote element in the overview, with the narrator’s name, the recording date and the time code.

  4. Share the released interviews

    Press Share on each interview whose narrator signed a release, and leave any restricted segment out. The town reads the summaries; researchers come to the archive for the rest.

Try this prompt

Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model):

Here are my listening notes and the catalogue record for Interview 7. Using know.sh, create a document titled “Interview 7 — Marjorie Tate: the quarry and the 1971 closing” on my shelf “Quarry and mill voices”. Make the record its overview and add one Observation section per segment, titled “time code — subject”, with a short summary taken only from my notes. For restricted segments, give only the time codes.

Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model):

Using know.sh, add a pull quote element to the overview of Interview 7, under the catalogue record. Copy the quote word for word from the Evidence section “00:58:40 — The whistle stops, 1971”, attribute it to Marjorie Tate with her recording date, and give the time code and recording number as its source. Change nothing else.

Made with

ShelfDocumentThe A–Z indexElementsYour AI assistantPublic link

See also