The Nanny Project:  The Stories

What I now call “The Nanny Project” began in 1999.  For several years, I had wanted to find a way to preserve some of the stories Nanny had always told when I was growing up about our family and about her life. On a visit to Rome in February, 1999, I woke up early one morning and was sitting with Nanny in her kitchen talking and drinking coffee, like we did most mornings whenever I visited.  I was taking some college classes in computer programming at the time, and I had thought about buying a small micro-cassette tape recorder (the kind that used the small little cassette tapes) to record the classes so I could listen to them again.  That morning, about 5:00 o’clock, as Nanny was telling one of my favorite stories, it occurred to me that I could buy one of those little recorders and use it to record Nanny telling stories.  

Right away, I got up from the kitchen table, told Nanny what I was going to do, and went out to the Walmart in West Rome and found exactly what I was looking for.  Over that weekend, I recorded a couple of hours of Nanny telling stories on two tapes.  That was the beginning of The Nanny Project.
 
After that, most every time I would come to Georgia to visit or whenever Nanny came down to visit Charlotte and me in Florida, I would get out that recorder and just turn it on, recording whatever conversation was taking place.  The last recording was made in November, 2003.  There are 25 of those little tapes with about 40 hours of recording, mostly conversations.

In 2000, in the early days (for me, at least) of the internet, I edited those first two tapes of stories, and made CD’s for people in my family.  At some point, I also created my first web page, and just called it “Laughing in Nanny’s Kitchen”.  

I hope you enjoy listening to these stories.
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Love and peace to you . . . Allan