My name is Katie Murphy, and I live outside of Portland, Maine. My office is in Portland's East End.

I've been writing most of my life, and have been a designer for almost 20 years.

I grew up listening to my father's stories about his Irish family, and my mother and grandmother's stories about growing up in Germany and in New York and New Jersey. My 5th grade teacher encouraged me to write down my own stories in journals and I've continued this on and off throughout the years.

I discovered that history is made up of the stories of individuals by devouring most of the series Childhood of Famous Americans–short, simply-written books about children who grew up to become important people in our country's history. Since then, I've always loved historical books that include the personal details of ordinary people who came to lead extraordinary lives. And I've come to understand that each and every person's life is extraordinary in some way. Everyone has an important place in the history of a family and a community, and has changed the world because of that. Telling the story of a person's life reveals just how.

Images help to document lives and some of our most "casual" images are important. My early visual education included a weekly perusal of Life magazine and the Sunday funnies...a healthy dose of TV cartoons...and trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. No matter what the medium, everything contributed to my growing love of color and design. In 1979, I moved to Maine after completing a degree in art history and several years later I earned a degree in Graphic Design from the Maine College of Art.

The most satisfying projects during my design career have always involved writing and editing; publication design eventually became my specialty. In my personal life, I'm a lover of local history, of second-hand shops and found objects, and I'm one of those people who will look at anybody's scrapbooks and listen to anybody's stories about "When I was growing up..."

When I realized that I could put all this together in a new career, the choice of becoming a personal historian was a happy decision. And, as a member of the Association of Personal Historians, I am able to tap into a network of people who are doing this important work in North America and throughout the world.

That's my story. What's yours?