Rhonda Lauritzen

Rhonda Lauritzen is a professional biographer with multiple published books. She does client work including building nominations to the National Register of Historic Places and writing client family history stories. She believes that when you tell your story, it changes the ending. This is why her passion is teaching, coaching clients, and presenting at conferences. As an author, she specializes in writing life stories, collecting oral history, and historical storytelling. Before she started this work full-time, she served as a college Vice President and before that was a corporate CEO.

Rhonda's Upcoming Live Webinars (1)

Wed, July 1 2026: 18:00 UTC
Automating Oral History: Best Tools for Transcribing Audio
Wed, July 1 2026: 18:00 UTC
When Rhonda first started writing people’s stories, she was appalled by how time-consuming and expensive it was to transcribe audio. She thought, "there has to be a better way," so she went on a mission to find the best ways for different use cases. Technologies have made a step-function improvement in recent years, yet many family historians are unaware of how amazing and affordable the tools are. You will learn DIY methods that include: Real-time speech-to-text transcription; Uploading audio files to programs like Otter.Ai or HappyScribe; Zoom transcriptions (and how to remove the pesky timestamps from every line!); Transcribe: a free online tool that mimics a foot-pedal dictation machine; How to combine multiple transcripts into one long document for each searchability.
When Rhonda first started writing people’s stories, she was appalled by how time-consuming and expensive it was to transcribe audio. She thought, "there has to be a better way," so she went on a mission to find the best ways for different use cases. Technologies have made a step-function improvement in recent years, yet many family historians are unaware of how amazing and affordable the tools are. You will learn DIY methods that include: Real-time speech-to-text transcription; Uploading audio files to programs like Otter.Ai or HappyScribe; Zoom transcriptions (and how to remove the pesky timestamps from every line!); Transcribe: a free online tool that mimics a foot-pedal dictation machine; How to combine multiple transcripts into one long document for each searchability.
Wed, July 1 2026: 18:00 UTC

Rhonda's Webinars (7)