ABSTRACT
Writing Letter to My Father: A Memoir, which arose in part from my rediscovery of my family archive, engaged me with everyday genres of life writing that I had hitherto ignored: correspondence, the scrapbook, high school and college yearbooks, and the engagement calendar. Family archives will become less common as many of these forms of life documentation become extinct in the era of electronic social media. The methodology of life writing scholars needs to be attentive to these endangered genres, and academics should be prepared to advise amateurs as they examine their family dossiers.
