About me
Lives are measured in memories, and your memories are worth preserving. Northwestern Lives provides professional legacy writing services to individuals and families who want to capture personal life stories, write their memoirs, or preserve family recipes.
Who I am
My name is Louis McGill, and I’m an award-winning journalist and experienced writer with a passion for telling true stories. I have a masters degree in journalism from DePaul university, and I’ve been writing professionally for over a decade. My clients have ranged from local news outlets to global corporations such as Autodesk, Microsoft, and impact.com. I want to use my training and experience to help you and your family preserve the stories you treasure.
I lost my grandfather to Alzheimer’s in 2008. In his life, he served as an airplane mechanic stationed in Japan during the Korean war, worked as an electron microscopist, raised a family of five, and taught me to make pasta by hand. I never got to hear many of those stories. They were lost long before he passed.
We often don’t realize the value of our memories or the memories of our loved ones until they’re lost. These stories are as important as they are ephemeral. They’re our shared oral history, and that history vanishes as soon as the tale stops being told.
Let me help you preserve your cherished memories.
What is legacy writing?
Simply put, legacy writing is a process of documenting one’s life experiences and family stories. Legacy writers capture these memories in audio, text, and sometimes even video to create a lasting document of a person’s life. Legacy writing products can be a cherished gift to loved ones, friends, and family.
There are many names for this kind of writing: personal history, memoir, biography, life story writing, and more. I prefer the term legacy writer. To me, it captures the importance of the work of preserving the story of a normal life well-lived.