What is oral history?
Oral history is the recording of conversations with individuals pertaining to their life and history.
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Mission History Project at NUI Maynooth
The oral history mission project was set up to collect and make permanent the life histories of a significant number of lay and religious missionaries of all Christian denominations, who had significant connections with Ireland. The resulting archive will be available to researchers at the Library, NUI Maynooth, before the end of 2004, and at other selected repositories also.

Why Irish Missionaries?
As a nation Ireland contributed greatly to the missionary movement in proportion to its population. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries uncounted numbers of Irish men and women worked overseas as teachers, nurses, social workers, priests, ministers and religious sisters, especially in areas colonized by the European powers. The individual experiences of those involved in such undertakings are unique and of vital importance in any attempt to understand the significance and impact of their work. Oral history methodology is a powerful research tool, utilized in this instance to capture and make permanent the personal insights these individuals process. 

Archival themes
The mission history oral archive will make available to scholars from Ireland and overseas primary source material relating to the recruitment, training and formation of missionaries and the lifestyles of people in religious orders and others involved in charitable works, at home and abroad, over a timescale of a century or more. It also helps to shed some light on the spiritual, social and other influences that led to these vocations. Other topics covered are changing concepts of mission between and among different religious groups.

By its very nature the everyday work of missionaries required interaction with different social and ethnic groups in the countries and places where they were stationed. Therefore, the interviews also provide valuable insights into the living conditions, the social order and politics of very different cultures from many parts of the world.

Although the oral history project is primarily concerned with missionary activities, the interviews take the form of life histories. Therefore, large tracts of information relating to Irish life have also been recovered.

Useful Oral History Links:

International Oral History Association

H-Oralhist is a network for scholars and professionals active in studies related to oral history.
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~oralhist

International Oral History Association 
http://www.ioha.fgv.br 

Canadian Oral History Association 
http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/oral-history 

Oral History Association (US) 
http://omega.dickinson.edu/organizations/oha
 

Ireland and UK
 Oral History Society (UK) 
http://www.oralhistory.org.uk

British Library Sound Archive
http://www.bl.uk//collections/sound-archive/nsa.html

BBC Education - History - 20th Century Vox 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/20cvox 

Department of Sound Records, Imperial War Museum, London 
http://www.iwm.org.uk/lambeth/sound.htm

ESRC Qualitative Data Archival Research Centre, University of Essex 
http://www.essex.ac.uk/qualidata 

Mass-Observation Archive, University of Sussex 
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/library/massobs/

Museum of Welsh Life, St Fagans, Cardiff 
http://www.nmgw.ac.uk/mwl/index.en.shtml 

Open University (UK): Studying Family and Community History 
http://hcrl.open.ac.uk/SocSci/da301/homepage.htm

School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh 
http://www.sss.ed.ac.uk 

The Society of Archivists Film and Sound Group (UK) 
http://www.pettarchiv.org.uk/fsgmain.htm