Transcription Sample
Here is a small slice of audio transcription work I did for one of my dad’s personal projects. I say small slice because this is only 2 of 12 pages of dialogue. The speaker is my grandmother and the topic is her family history. My dad wanted to log her life’s history and asked if I’d be willing to transcribe the audio after recording it.
When transcribing this recording, I knew that my dad’s goal was not only to capture the family history, but also to save the way his mother told it. I kept that in mind and did my part by directly transcribing the way she speaks.
It was a fun challenge because of how unique her speech style is. Being Australian and from another generation, her mannerisms, her lexicon, and her speech patterns
History is one thing, the person behind it is another. That means I kept in some of the verbal ticks that I would have removed for in other transcriptions.
Q: So, to get started today, Mom, I thought-- if you could just start out with an intro and introduce yourself and maybe start out with talking about your family background and, also, when and where you were you were born and some of your family background.
A: Where I was born? Ok. So, I’ll start with my parents. My mother was one of eight children. They were kind of pioneer-- an Irish family. They came to this country, I believe it was after the famine, they were able to-- they had nine or ten children and my mother was in the middle. Then their name was, let's see, she was a Harris. That’s H-A-R-R-I-S and that’s actually a Scottish name, but I believe in those-- in the history of both countries, Scotland and Ireland, if one became Protestant, they would move to the other, and I think that’s what happened. The Harris’ were actually Scottish, but then Mary Queen of Scots was killed-- murdered I guess, by her sister Elizabeth, so the country of Scotland became Protestant and Catholics were being persecuted. So, they went back and forth. Anyway, her ancestors were actually French immigrants, Bourchier (B-O-U-R-C-H-I-E-R) and they came over with William Bob. He came over with William The Conqueror. And a Bourchier was like a purse keeper, a financial advisor or he took charge of the money for William The Conqueror, the king.
Anyway, a branch of the family ended up in Ireland with Cromwell’s army to suppress the wild Irish and that’s how they came to live there. The Brits had taken the country of Ireland and given it to a German prince-- William of Orange who married one of their princesses-- as a wedding gift, but it really wasn’t theirs to give and this caused all sorts of mayhem. The Brits came over as the overlord and people were actually persecuted. They were not allowed to speak their own language, they were not allowed-- their children were not allowed to go to school, and the Brits took all the, you know, the best crops. They let them pay rent on their own land by giving the Brits the best crops that could be sold overseas and that was wheat and barley and all these things that people buy. The only thing left to eat was the potato, and of course we know what happened. The potato got a disease and wiped out a third of the population, they say.
But anyway, apparently my family survived all that. They were able to pay their own passage out to Australia. In the 1700 or 1800s. My mother’s grandmother was the oldest girl and she ended up marrying my great grandfather who *chuckles* was not their choice, to say the least. And then she, in turn, let’s see-- she was cut out of the family anyway, because she didn’t marry a man they would have chosen, and they ended up having eight children. She was the daughter of the original settler, but she was born in Ireland, and then she married in Australia with not a man they would want her to marry. So she was kind of left on her own and I imagine she was very angry and bitter. The family was quite well off, but she was like the outcast for getting married.
And my grandfather, Luke Harris, became an invalid. He had tuberculosis. My grandmother, Katherine Horne Harris, ended up with eight children. Seven girls and the last was a boy named Tom. They really had to struggle. My sister and I went to the little town where she lived after my mother died. My mother was very ashamed of her background, so she kept all this hidden and we had to just dig it up out of the ashes. I’ve got lots of cousins and relatives in Australia whom I’ve never met; my mother did stay in touch with a couple of her sisters.
Anyway, she made a new life. They lived in Victoria, which was quite cold, and my mother moved up to Queensland. When she left home, she took a nursing course, like a home health assistant. She took care of an elderly lady, Mrs. Mark. I think they were a Jewish family. She took me to meet the family, actually, when I was sixteen. Then she and another friend, just to escape the cold and damp climate, moved back to Queensland. She took up a position taking care of an invalid girl on a sheep or cattle station in Roma. It happened that my father was there in Roma and automobiles were very new then-- this was the turn of the century. It was during the first world war, I believe, but for some reason my father did not go to war and I think his-- the aunt who raised him made sure of that because her country had been occupied by the Germans when she was a little girl. She just hated war and would have advised him not to go, I know.
He did have his chronic chest condition that wasn’t quite asthma, but it might have been enough to keep him out; he never talked about it. He was acting as chauffeur for-- it’s like the county agricultural inspector. Somehow they met and got married in 1920. He was, let’s see, he was in his late twenties. He was born in 1892, I believe, and she was just twenty. It was about eight years difference in their age. So they were married in Roma and they could not be married in the Catholic church because he wasn’t a Catholic, so they were married in the rectory, but it was all quite legal. They moved to Brisbane because there were so many more opportunities in Brisbane, which was the capital of my state.