We encourage all West Virginia veterans to participate in the Veterans History Project to record their accounts of history for future generations. As war veterans, you are a treasure trove of information and history. Your stories tell the history of our country as first-hand accounts of important moments. In an effort to preserve your stories, we ask you to take part in the U.S. Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project.
This history project aims to collect, preserve, and store accounts of war veterans’ service for future generations. It is not often that we have access to direct accounts of historical events and gaining insight into your personal experience is a precious resource that we do not want to lose for posterity.
History comes from more than just a book. The Library of Congress makes all accounts of war time service available for public access. The Veterans History Project is intended to ensure that people can hear the stories of battle directly from those who have experienced it in order to better understand war. Ideally, stories will be told from your perspective to give a personal view of the events that occurred. The project also accepts letters, postcards, journals, and diaries, as well as visual materials such as photographs, drawings, or scrapbooks.
Veterans may participate by either being the interviewer or the interviewee. Participants can donate items to the Library of Congress. A veteran’s next of kin can also participate on behalf of a deceased veteran. The Veterans History Project accepts oral accounts by immediate family members of a veteran who died because of their service during a period of war.
The Veterans History Project also encourages students to participate in the process. The project provides special resources to students in 10th grade and above to help collect stories and interviews from war time veterans. These resources encourage students to collect oral histories through veteran interviews that are then submitted to the project.
Items and archived stories from the Veterans History Project can be found on the U.S. Library of Congress’ Folklife Center webpage.
Anyone who wishes to take part in the initiative should first read the Veterans History Project Field Kit and watch the 15-minute Field Kit Video. A printable version of the History Project Field Kit is available and can be obtained by emailing vohp@loc.gov.
For more information about the Veterans History Project, please visit https://www.loc.gov/vets/.