Court Reporters & the Veterans History Project

It was Tawni Kind, a court reporter, and also the wife of Rep. Ron Kind (D-WI), who first envisioned a partnership between the National Court Reporters Foundation (NCRF), the National Court Reporters Association (NCRA),  and the Veterans History Project (VHP).

10 years and almost 3,000 oral histories later, this partnership remains strong and continues to expand, thanks in large measure to Beth Kilker, the Oral Histories Project Coordinator at NCRF, as well as America’s court reporting schools, court reporting firms and courts, such as the Lake County Courthouse in Waukegan, Illinois, shown here.

Because of NCRA’s and NCRF’s partnership with the VHP and Library of Congress, history is being recorded and preserved for future generations to examine.  Never before have our children had an opportunity to comprehend the devastation wrought by war as recounted through so many soldiers’ first-hand experiences. This is a first in the making of history.

As court reporters, we are gifted with the ability to give back to society in so many ways – from providing real-time captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing, to shadowing students in school utilizing CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation), to giving late-deafened adults the ability to participate in town hall meetings and training sessions.

We owe our freedom to our Veterans. This gift of their memories as recorded and transcribed by us is something that future generations now have available to them as a learning tool. Thank you, court reporting community, for the time you’ve taken to give this gift of history, knowledge, and insight to the world.