Traci's great-grandparents

This is what I wrote on 4 March about Traci's Great-Grandparents and about my parents' recording of me as a child:

Just a quick line to tell you about an exile tape that I've located. I was talking about the project with one of the people I work with - his name is Gareth Walker - and he said that his wife, Traci, has a tape of her great-grandfather talking about his own journey from Eastern Europe to the US, I think in the early years of the 20th century. Traci's mother made the tape some years ago precisely so that the story wouldn't be lost. The evening after we talked, Gareth asked Traci if she'd be willing for us to listen to the material and perhaps use it, and she said yes, completely happy.

Gareth and Traci both work on phonetics, so they're very used to audio technology and will digitise the tape themselves and let us have a CD. (They're perfectly happy for us to use the actual tape later on, if you decided you liked it and wanted to clean up the sound quality or anything like that.)

I've also been listening to the stuff that my Mum and Dad dug up last time I went over. I have to say that I haven't really hit anything very promising yet. There's a tape of me as a child - it's a sort of monologue with real words in it but it doesn't make much sense. Actually, I think the idea was that I was pretending to 'speak French' but, of course, it's nonsense with a few English words thrown in. Maybe that *is* a kind of exile tape? There's really very little with my parents' voices. I think they utter some words of encouragement on the 'French' tape but it's difficult to hear. (Actually, as I write about that recording, it begins to sound more interesting than I thought it was when I first listened to it...)