Audrey Tomaselli's Own Story
Some years ago I moved to the San Francisco neighborhood I had long been drawn to, where the City’s colorful history began during the Gold Rush. Businesses flourished on the waterfront, and sailors and immigrants mingled in nearby North Beach and Telegraph Hill. As I explored my new neighborhood, I felt as if I were walking in their footprints. I tried to imagine what the neighborhood was like in those years and how it had changed over time.
Then I began to think about my elderly neighbors, many of whom were Italian American and had grown up in the neighborhood. Surely they must have memories of a time and culture that was fast disappearing. It became my passion to preserve their stories before it was too late, so I launched the Telegraph Hill Dwellers Oral History Project. The many narrators I interviewed, through their compelling stories, powerfully communicated a vanished time. Transcripts from that project are in the collections of several key institutions, including The Bancroft Library of California History at The University of California, Berkeley.
"Thank you very, very much for the [oral history] transcripts you have sent. I had to read every one, and some parts twice. We will put them in The Bancroft Library, cataloged as an ongoing collection"
Willa K. Baum, Division Head (ret.) Regional Oral History Office
At the conclusion of my involvement in the Oral History Project, I reached outside my neighborhood to residents of the San Francisco Bay Area and then beyond. What began as a very personal journey to discover and record the soul of my own neighborhood had matured.
