By John Johnston / Enquirer staff writer

With interviewer Steve Duff prompting her, Betty Johnson pours out her life story.

Betty Johnson remenisces about her life as daughter Judith Johnson looks on during a pre-interview at Life Capsule. (Mike Simons/The Enquirer)

The 82-year-old Hyde Park resident recounts growing up in Cincinnati, her college years at Wellesley and Haverford and her experiences as a relief worker in post-World War II Germany. She talks about the former tank commander she met and married, and the two daughters they raised.

The interview, being captured on digital audio and video in a Blue Ash studio, is insightful and sometimes poignant, such as when Johnson describes her last visit with her husband, Morse, who was living in a home for Alzheimer's patients.

"I was sitting beside him, holding his hand. He looked at me and said, 'You know, Betty, I love you so dearly.' Then he smiled, and went sound to sleep ... That night after I'd gone to bed, the phone rang. They said Morse had died. I thought to myself, what a beautiful farewell."

Johnson's 80-minute interview will be enhanced with music and family photographs and packaged into a video biography by Life Capsule, one of a growing number of companies in Cincinnati and around the country that record and preserve personal histories.

Children cherish stories

"History has always been about famous, important people," says Duff, who owns and operates Life Capsule with Bill Poff. "Now, with the advent of digital technology, we're able to make high-quality recordings affordable for everyday people."

Often, he says, it's sons and daughters who want to preserve the stories of their aging parents before it's too late.

That was the case with Judith Johnson of Mount Washington, who watched her mother's interview at Life Capsule. Like many older people, her mother has begun to struggle with short-term memory loss.

"This is vital information that is priceless," Judith Johnson says, noting she wants her mother's memories preserved so future generations can know her.

Most timid about interview

Betty Johnson had to be coaxed into being interviewed. That's not unusual, personal historians say.

"Almost everybody's first reaction is, 'I've had an ordinary life.' And of course, no one has had an ordinary life. Every one has had at least moments of extraordinary," says Mary Ann Mayers, a personal historian who two years ago founded Colerain Township-based Extraordinary Lives.

The methods of recording stories, formats of the final product and costs for such services vary widely.

Life Capsule's finished product is a DVD that could pass for a documentary on the History Channel. A typical project costs $3,000.

"The quality is supreme," says Tonya Baldwin of downtown Cincinnati. About a year ago she took her father, Grady Baldwin of South Cumminsville, to Life Capsule to tell his life story, including his stint as a member of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, the World War II group of black military pilots.

"My parents are aging. My father's 85," she says. "He talks about his history all the time. This was a way for me to capture a living essence of a loved one."

Life Capsule, which has made more than 80 video biographies, stores a digital master of every film in an archive so that as new technologies become available, the film can be copied in the new medium.

Mayers, of Extraordinary Lives, also records storytellers using digital video and audio. And she offers customers other options for personal histories, such as scrapbooks and hard- or soft-bound books. A typical project, she says, consists of a series of interviews totaling six to 12 hours. Prices range from about $500 for a simple video montage using still photos to $10,000 or more for a book that reads like a memoir.

Rather than conduct face-to-face interviews, Montgomery-based Making everlasting Memories, or MeM, relies on customers to supply existing materials, such as photos, articles and other documents that are typically filed away in shoe boxes. After creating a digital archive of images and information, the company generates a multimedia presentation that can be burned onto a DVD or viewed on the Internet.

Various groups, including a nationwide network of funeral homes and cemeteries, market MeM's DVD, which can be played as part of a tribute at a funeral service. The retail price, which is not set by MeM, typically ranges from about $100 to $200, says MeM president and CEO G. Scott Mindrum, who founded the company in 1996.

Customers also can add images, words and guest book entries to create an updateable Internet archive "that (family members) can access anytime they want, from anywhere they happen to be," Mindrum says. "It becomes an ongoing family library." Cost: $295.

Personal history

Mindrum says the desire to preserve personal histories is ancient, going back at least as far as the days when the story of a day's hunt was etched onto cave walls.

Today, Life Capsule's Poff and Duff say, technology offers the advantage of capturing exactly how a person looks and sounds.

"My grandfather died when I was six months old," Poff says. "I have one picture of him holding me in the hospital. I never knew what he sounded like. Did he have a deep voice like I do?"

He'll never hear it. Betty Johnson's family, on the other hand, will be able to revisit her life story as she told it in the summer of 2004.

E-mail jjohnston@enquirer.com