How to Start a Folklore Journal: A Beginner's Guide to Recording Local Myths and Customs

Stand at a bus stop and mention the word "folklore" and most people will picture dragons. Ask instead about the well behind the church, or the lane the dogs will not walk down, and the conversation changes. Everyone has a fragment: a rhyme, a remedy, a recipe for a funeral tea, a name for a field nobody can explain. A folklore journal is simply somewhere to put those fragments before they go. You do not need a qualification or a grant. You need a notebook, a system, and a fair amount of tact.

Decide What the Journal Is For

Most first attempts fail because one book is asked to do three jobs at once. It becomes a memory diary, a fieldwork record and a research notebook all at once, and within a month it is soup.

Pick a bias. If your interest is personal — what your grandmother said about magpies, the way your father always turned his collar up at a certain gate — then write for yourself and keep it loose. If you are recording other people's accounts, the journal is evidence, and evidence needs dates, names and context.

A workable compromise is two notebooks. Carry a small pocket book for rough notes made on the move, then write the entry up properly at home within a day or two, while you can still remember the tone of voice and which chair you were sitting in. Copying up is not duplication; it is the point at which scattered jottings become a record.

Choosing a Notebook and a Kit

Do not spend forty pounds on a leather-bound volume and then refuse to write in it. A journal that is too precious to spoil is a journal that stays empty. A few practicalities matter more than looks:

• Binding. An A5 hardback with sewn sections will lie flat on a table and survive a rucksack. Glued spines shed pages.
• Paper. Thick enough that pencil does not show through, and ideally not shiny, so ink dries quickly.
• Pencil for the field, pen for the write-up. Pencil works in rain, cold and on a wall. Keep a soft pencil and a small sharpener in the same bag as the book.
• Protection. A dry bag or a large zip-lock keeps a notebook usable through a wet walk; a phone case with a lanyard stops you dropping it into a stream.
• Numbering. Number the pages as you fill them and reserve the first two for an index. You will thank yourself in three years.

Digital notes are fine, and audio recordings are invaluable, but treat them as copies rather than originals. Transcribe the important parts soon, back everything up somewhere other than the device you recorded it on, and photograph paper pages every few months.

Structuring an Entry

A consistent header does most of the work. Every entry should be able to answer the same questions, whether it runs to three lines or three pages.

1. When and where. Date, time, and place. A street name, a grid reference or a what3words location will do.
2. Who. Name, approximate age, how you know them, and whether they agreed to be quoted.
3. What was said. The account itself, in the teller's own words.
4. Where it came from before them. "Her mother had it from a man at the pit" is a line worth its weight.
5. Conditions. In a kitchen, at a wake, halfway up a hill, after two pints. Context shapes what people are willing to say.
6. Your own notes. What you noticed, what you did not ask, what you want to check.

Keep their words and yours apart

Use quotation marks for what was said, square brackets for anything you have supplied, and a separate paragraph for your interpretation. Resist tidying dialect. If a teller says "cob" rather than "spider", or calls a plant by a name you cannot find in a field guide, write it down and note the pronunciation. An odd spelling may be the most valuable thing on the page.

Recording Stories in the Field

Ask open questions and then stop talking. "What did people say about that barn?" will take you further than "Was it haunted?" Silences are productive; fill them and you get your own story back.

Record only with clear permission, and if someone says no, put the phone away and take notes openly. Do not record in a pub or a café without saying so. Note the setting as carefully as the words, ask who else you should speak to, and go back a second time. The best material usually arrives on the third visit, once you have stopped being a stranger with a notebook.

Citing Sources So the Record Holds Up

Citing is not bureaucracy. It is how a claim can be checked in twenty years and how credit stays with the person who told you.

• Oral accounts: name (or agreed pseudonym), date, place, who else was present, and how they came to know the story.
• Books and pamphlets: author, title, publisher, year, page.
• Archives and record offices: repository, collection name and reference number.
• Websites: page title, site name and the date you looked at it.

If you quote a teller in anything you publish, cite them as you would cite a book. A note in the margin of your own journal — "see p. 42, Jimmy's version differs" — is enough to keep a story's family tree intact.

Documenting Other People's Stories Ethically

Explain at the start what you intend to do with the material, and offer anonymity where it is wanted. Some traditions are family property, some are tied to a trade or a faith, and some people simply do not want their grandmother's words printed.

Treat healing charms, cures and protective rituals as folklore, not as medical advice; anyone considering a treatment should speak to a doctor or pharmacist. Handle material that a community regards as sacred with restraint, and ask before photographing buildings, graves or private land. If you write for publication, remember that information about living people carries legal protections, so take proper advice before you publish names. And if someone later asks you to remove something, remove it.

The simplest good practice is to give back. Send a copy of the entry to the person who told you, and offer a duplicate to your local record office or county archive, which will know whether it fits its collections. If you ever make money from a story, share it.

Start With the Story on Your Doorstep

Set yourself one modest task this week: write three entries. One thing you remember from childhood that you have never seen written down. One place name you cannot explain. One question you would like to ask an older relative or neighbour.

Then find your local studies library or county record office, and ask what they already hold for your parish, street or town. Read it before you add to it. A journal kept for a year is a curiosity; kept for ten, it becomes a source that other people cite, and the well-dressing, the pace-egging song or the rhyme your neighbour half-remembers will still be there for the next person who comes asking.

Photo: Markus Spiske / Pexels