About TheirStory

Zack Ellis introduces the webinar, “100 Voices of Route 66: From Oral History to Museum Exhibit,” outlining a discussion of the project’s origins, development, outcomes, and lessons learned. He introduces Illinois State Museum staff Erika Holst and Amanda Bryden.

Erika Holst and Amanda Bryden describe their complementary roles as curator and registrar in the museum’s two-person history department. They also introduce the Illinois State Museum, its statewide mission, and its collection of approximately 12 million objects.

Erika provides an overview of Route 66, the roughly 2,500-mile federal highway commissioned in 1926 between Chicago and Los Angeles. Over its century of existence, the road has reflected transportation, political, social, and cultural changes across the United States.

Amanda explains how the approaching Route 66 centennial prompted the museum to consider ways to commemorate the highway. An initial interest in using TheirStory to document information from museum donors evolved into a much larger oral history initiative.

A montage of oral history narrators describes Route 66 as transportation, freedom, family memory, Black history, social change, Americana, small business, and a way of experiencing the country. Together, their voices demonstrate the wide range of personal meanings attached to the highway.

Erika and Amanda describe the museum’s limited recent experience with oral history and their initial apprehension about conducting 100 interviews while maintaining their normal museum responsibilities. The ambitious target became a major logistical challenge for their small department.

The project received approximately $8,000 through a National Park Service Route 66 Corridor Preservation grant. Although the funding helped cover TheirStory and other costs, Amanda emphasizes that staff time represented the project’s largest resource commitment.

The museum brought in Judy Wagenblast to help identify people with firsthand memories of Route 66. Her community connections generated an initial pool of roughly 20–25 narrators, with early recruitment focused on people who remembered living, working, or traveling along the road before the interstate era.

The team initially expected many participants to independently record answers to prompts through TheirStory, but only about two of the 100 interviews were completed this way. Because many narrators were older and preferred personal interaction, the team pivoted toward live and in-person interviewing.

After exhausting their initial contacts, Erika and Amanda expanded recruitment through referrals, historical societies, Facebook groups, professional targeting, press releases, and direct outreach. They also sought geographic diversity across roughly 300 miles of Route 66 in Illinois.

The team describes how their interview setup evolved through trial and error. A laptop, external microphone, and mobile Wi-Fi hotspot provided a portable system that worked in museums, libraries, homes, and rural locations while remaining unintimidating for narrators.

Amanda explains how she prepared narrators for conversational interviews without relying on a rigid list of questions. Small talk, flexible prompts, careful note-taking, and follow-up questions helped participants relax and allowed unexpected memories to emerge naturally.

Without predetermined thematic questions, the interviews naturally clustered around people who worked, lived, and traveled along Route 66. Childhood road trips, roadside life, occupations, and everyday experiences became recurring subjects across the collection.

Amanda recalls interviewing a retired Illinois state trooper who patrolled Route 66 during the 1960s and 1970s. His memories of working alone, responding to crashes with rudimentary equipment, and the historical role of funeral homes in ambulance service reveal aspects of everyday history rarely preserved in textbooks.

Erika discusses interviews with Black travelers whose Route 66 experiences were shaped by racial discrimination. Adults recalling childhood vacations recognized how their parents used strategies such as the Green Book, packing food, and carefully choosing stops to protect their children while creating joyful family memories.

The interviews captured sensory and everyday details—such as urban smells or roadside litter—that rarely appear in scholarly histories. These seemingly small memories helped the museum develop a more authentic representation of what traveling Route 66 actually felt like.

The grant established a firm quantitative goal of 100 interviews, but the team also prioritized meaningful content and geographic representation. The finished collection totaled roughly 75 hours and included perspectives from large and small communities throughout Illinois.

Beyond numerical goals, Erika describes the human impact of inviting ordinary people to preserve their memories. Some narrators have since died, making their recorded voices and stories especially meaningful to surviving family members and demonstrating oral history’s value as a personal legacy.

Narrators were delighted to see themselves and their memories represented in a museum exhibition, while family members sometimes discovered stories they had never heard before. Participation gave everyday people an unexpected sense of inclusion in the historical record.

Erika describes how the team moved from raw oral histories to exhibition development. They selected memorable excerpts, grouped them into recurring themes such as eating, traveling, and working, and identified quotations and stories that could be translated into visual and object-based interpretation.