Remembering Beneath the Big Sky

The Gathering: Collected Oral Histories of the Irish in Montana is a long term oral history research project, conducting interviews of volunteer subjects. These interviews provided the basis for Remembering Beneath The Big Sky or Ag Cuimhneamh Siar Faoin Spéir Mhór, a catalog of brief overviews, which was composed by Project Director Dr. Bernadette Sweeney, Sandra Williamson, and myself during fall semester of 2011. The overviews were pulled directly from the interviews, allowing quick reference to each interview\u27s themes. The catalog provides a creatively written narrative, to exemplify the contents of the individual interviews, and the information collected from the project as a whole. Contained in these interviews are stories of love, homesteads, ranching, mining, farming, immigration, emigration, legends, myths, politics, society, and personal history. Sandra Williamson\u27s goal is to use the project as a model to develop an educational curriculum for young people to record the histories of their community members by interviewing their elders while attending high school, allowing the project to have a deeper impact both in their individual lives, and in the community at large. I find the most interesting revelation to be the connectivity of our world, as Montanans discuss events in Ireland, and subjects in Ireland speak of events in Montana, which was made readily apparent as I read through indexes and transcripts, as well as listened to interviews to compose the overviews of the catalog. In both instances, the project allows for the preservation of our history, which would otherwise be lost