As a follow up to her article on the benefits of recording the memories of our elders, Seniors Guide writer Terri L. Jones offers tips and resources for preserving family stories.
Was it love at first sight when your parents first met? How did your Aunt Marie meet President Truman? Did your Uncle Bob really drive race cars? While you may have heard some of these family stories before, there are so many others that you may not know at all. Wouldn’t you like to learn as much of your family’s lore as possible and preserve these stories for the younger (and future) generations of your family? But where do you even begin?
We’ve put together some tips for preserving family stories, to help you become your family’s unofficial historian and make this daunting, yet worthwhile, task a little easier and hopefully a lot more fun.
Preserving family stories
1. Decide upon the scope
First, identify exactly what scope of information you’d like to capture and preserve for posterity. Do you want your dad to recount his entire life story or just get him talking about participating in Civil Rights protests or other specific memories? In either case, establishing an outline of the timeline or which particular events you’d like to capture will make the project feel less overwhelming. It will also keep everyone as focused as possible. However, while you want to remain on task, don’t discourage tangents altogether as they can lead to interesting stories that you may not have known otherwise!
2. Plan out some questions
Be sure to have questions prepared to help start the conversation and guide your loved ones through the timeframe or topics that you’re curious about. For example, if you want your mom to talk about her teen years, ask her to tell you about one crazy thing she did with her friends or how her schoolmates might have described her. Shannon Alder’s book, “300 Questions to Ask Your Parents Before It’s Too Late,” offers a helpful starting point.
Although it’s beneficial to have a list of questions at the ready, your relative may not feel comfortable being “interviewed,” per se. You could lighten up the back-and-forth by pretending that you’re on “60 Minutes” or their favorite interview-style television show. If this format still feels stiff or awkward, simply try to keep your questions as casual and conversational as possible to just keep your mom or dad talking.
3. Commit to an appropriate pace
Try to schedule a regular time each week to talk with your family member. But start slowly with a short conversation and then gradually increase the amount of time you spend together. Just remember that you’re asking your loved one to recall deeply personal – and sometimes emotional – memories, so you don’t want to wear them out!
4. Have an idea of the format
Unless you’re very proficient in taking notes, you’ll probably want to record this exchange using a recording app on your phone or computer. Once recorded, you can either share the audio with family members using a file sharing solution such as Dropbox, WeTransfer, or Google Drive. Alternatively, you transcribe these stories into text using TapeACall, which also records and transcribes phone conversations, or other audio/transcription apps. Updated versions of Microsoft Word also enable transcription, using direct conversation or a recording.
Once your loved one’s words are transcribed, you can print the stories and compile them in a binder yourself or have them professionally printed in book form through a custom book printer like Mixam, iUniverse, or Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.
Another custom book company, Storyworth, will even handle the interviews for you! When you sign up with Storyworth, they’ll email your relative one question (of your choosing) every week and your loved one can respond to these questions at their leisure. At the end of the year, you’ll receive a beautiful hardbound book to hand down to the kids and grandkids.
If your loved one would like to go through the story collecting process on their own, give them a journal with prepared questions for them to select, ponder, and answer when the mood strikes. This series comes in multiple titles, with questions designed for adults and grandkids to ask Dad, Grandpa, Mom, Grandma, Nana, and more.
As you hear each new story, you’ll be painting a cherished picture of your loved one’s life, while creating a keepsake to enlighten and enrich your family for generations.
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