After each of my parents died, I was overjoyed to find tapes of each of them from accidental recordings (answering machine, cellphone). I don’t trust Prego/LoC, but the sound of my parents, voices gives me peace.
One time my mom phoned my cell phone in her later years. Totally by accident, and I didn’t hear it ring, so she left a message. That’s still on my phone, 10 years later. I love playing it from time to time. Lord, I miss her. She was the best person! Incredible lady!
Lovely that you have those tapes. I’d be so happy to hear my father’s voice again. He knew everything about food and politics and traveling. Could be stern or funny, and I knew he loved me either way.
LOC is home to many important oral histories including:
Slave narratives - interviews with people who lived as slaves; Interviews of Americans taken immediately after Dec. 7, 1941; Interviews of Americans taken immediately after 9/11; More than 110,000 first person histories of veterans of all wars including Frank Buckles the last WWI vet; A massive Twitter archive covering roughly 2006–2017 (public tweets/not currently searchable); Stories from American workers—coal miners, fishermen, taxi drivers; oral histories of luminaries of Jazz, Supreme Court justices, etc.
Story Corps is not part of LOC although they send their collections there for archiving and access.
LOC’s Veterans History Project is phenomenal. If you have a veteran in your life, I strongly suggest you look into this as a home for their story.