How to record family stories: every method, honestly compared

Decide this first: one big session, or something small that repeats?

Before choosing tools, choose a shape. The one-off approach — a long recorded interview on a Sunday afternoon — produces something wonderful when it happens. The catch is the “when it happens”: it needs scheduling, energy, and a storyteller in the mood, which is why so many of these projects live permanently at “we really must do that.” The comment sections under recording guides are full of the aftermath — families who circled the big interview until the chance quietly went.

The repeating approach — one small question a week, answered by voice note, letter or email — asks almost nothing of anyone on any given day, which is precisely why it works. Fifty-two small answers is a book; the marathon that never got scheduled is not. If you take one thing from this page: pick the shape your family will still be doing in November, then pick the tools to match.

The methods, honestly

Phone voice memos — free, and genuinely good. Sit beside them, put the phone on the table (not in their face), and record over tea. You keep their actual voice, which no other cheap method gives you. The honest catch: the files pile up unlabelled on one person’s phone, which is where they die — see the longevity section below.

Video — the richest record and the most refused. Plenty of people over seventy stiffen in front of a lens and talk half as freely. If your storyteller lights up on camera, take the gift; if they visibly perform or decline, drop to audio without ceremony. A compromise that works: video for one special occasion, audio for the rest.

Writing it down yourself — free, invisible to the storyteller, and dependent entirely on your discipline. Works well as a companion to visits (write up the story the same evening, in their words) and badly as the whole plan. The gift-shop fill-in memoir books belong here too: lovely for the rare self-starter, but most sit untouched — buyers say as much in every forum thread about them.

Letters and email — the underrated one. Ask one question per letter or email and the reply arrives written by them, in their voice, dated, and already preserved. Nobody performs in a reply the way they do on camera; shy and camera-averse storytellers often say more in writing than they ever would out loud. This is the method our own service is built on — one gentle question a week by email, replies kept and built into a book (free to start, £27 a year) — but you can run the letter version yourself with stamps and a shoebox, and it will work for the same reasons.

Guided book services — £79 to £150 (StoryKeeper, Your Story and similar): scheduled questions, their answers, a printed hardcover at the end. You’re paying for structure and an object. We compared them all, prices verified, in our life story book roundup.

Professional help — from about £2,600 (StoryTerrace) to £12,000+ (LifeBook Memoirs) for ghostwritten memoirs, or a few hundred pounds for a professionally filmed interview. Right when the budget exists and nobody in the family has the bandwidth to drive the project; the storyteller only has to talk.

Getting them talking (the part that isn’t equipment)

Ask about things, not feelings: the first house, the first wage packet, what her mother cooked. Bring an object or a photograph and let it do the opening. Let silences sit — the best material arrives ten seconds after you thought they’d finished. And take tangents: the story they wander into is usually better than the one you asked for.

If your storyteller waves it away with “my life wasn’t very interesting” — that’s modesty, not refusal, and it has answers. We wrote a whole guide on helping a reluctant parent talk about the past; the one-sentence version is: make the question smaller, say plainly why you want to know, and start with a thing rather than a question.

Will it still open in thirty years?

A 2011 guide that still ranks for this search recommends burning the recordings to DVD — which is the whole lesson in one sentence. Formats die. Keep recordings in boring, open formats (MP3 or WAV for audio, plain text or PDF for writing), not locked inside an app that may not exist when your children go looking.

Follow the 3-2-1 habit loosely: the file in three places, two kinds of place (a cloud drive and a hard drive), one of them outside the house. Label files with names and dates the day you record them — “Voice 047” helps nobody in 2056. And print the best of it: paper has outlasted every format ever invented, and a printed book needs no password.

That last point matters more than it seems. If everything lives in one person’s phone or cloud account, ask what happens when that account’s owner is gone — UK families can spend months on “digital legacy” access requests. Shared, printed, and duplicated beats private, digital, and single-copy.

UK resources worth knowing

The Oral History Society (ohs.org.uk) publishes practical interviewing and consent guidance — worth ten minutes before recording anyone, and essential if you ever want the recordings to join an archive. The BBC’s Listening Project conversations are preserved at the British Library and make lovely listening for the shape a recorded family conversation can take. And if your storyteller is living with dementia, the Alzheimer’s Society’s reminiscence guidance is the right starting point — memory-lane work is usually a comfort, but it deserves their gentler rules.

A plan for this month, not someday

This week: ask one question at the table or on the phone, and write the answer down the same evening. Next week: another. If it’s going well by week four, decide the shape properly — voice memos on visits, a letter exchange, a weekly email question, or a guided service if you want a hardcover at the end.

That’s the entire method. Small, regular, and started — which, as the man said, is what counts.