Cincinnati Veterans History Project

The Cincinnati Public Library History and Genealogy Department is active in the national Veteran's History Project and has been conducting video taped interviews of W.W.II veterans since 2006 at the main and branch Cincinnati area libraries. As an ongoing project, if you are a veteran of our armed services you can still arrange to be interviewed and have your stories, photos and memorabilia submitted to the Library of Congress database and video depository. The interviewee also receives a copy of the interview on DVD. You could then bring that DVD to WFOVideo and we can make copies with nice disc and case jacket artwork. The library staff has done a nice job lining up qualified volunteer veterans and historians to conduct the interviews in a professional manner.

Coordinated by the Library of Congress (LOC) through it's American Folklife Center, the Veterans History Project calls for Americans to play a personal role in preserving the nation’s history by collecting firsthand accounts of those who defended the United States during wartime. LOC is archiving audio- and video-recorded oral histories, along with documentary materials (photos, diaries, letters, etc.) from veterans of World War I, World War II, and the Korean, Vietnamese, and Persian Gulf Wars as well as civilians who served in support of the veterans. As an official partner in this project, Library staff recruit veterans and volunteer interviewers, coordinate recording sessions, operate camera equipment, process the video recordings and documentary materials, and send duplicate copies of recordings and documentary materials to LOC for inclusion in their archives and national database. Selected recordings are available on LOC’s website.

The Cincinnati Veterans History website features a database of locally recorded interviews, documentary materials, and video streamed versions of selected interviews. Appropriately, the original documentary materials for our Veteran’s Archives will be housed at the Main Cincinnati Library, which was dedicated as a Memorial Library when it opened in 1955.

For information about scheduling an interview with Library staff, contact the History & Genealogy Department by phone (513-369-6907) or email veteranshistory@cincinnatilibary.org.

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