Recording the stories before they're lost: interviewing older relatives
The most valuable thing in the archive isn't in the box — it's in someone's head. A practical guide to getting it recorded.
6 min read
Photographs without names become decoration within two generations. The single highest-value hour you can spend on a family archive is sitting down with the oldest person who remembers, a box of prints, and a phone set to record.
Use the photographs as prompts
Open questions produce short answers. A photograph produces stories. Hand over one print at a time and ask who, where, and what happened next. Don't correct them mid-flow, even when dates are clearly wrong — accuracy can be checked later, the recording can't be redone.
The questions that actually work
What was the house like? Who else lived there? What did your father do on a Sunday? What did you eat on a normal Tuesday? Specific and mundane questions unlock far more than 'tell me about your childhood'.
Recording practicalities
A phone voice memo on a table between you is enough. Sit in a quiet room, off carpet-free hard floors if you can, and say the date and who's present at the start. Keep sessions to forty minutes — longer tires people and the later material gets thinner.
Do the transcript, or at least an index
A two-hour recording nobody has listened to is nearly as lost as no recording. Write timestamps against topics so future family members can find the bit about the shop, or the war, or the move to Cambridgeshire.
Then label the prints
Straight after the session, write names in soft pencil on the reverse of prints, in the margin, never with biro or marker. Better still, scan them and put names in the file name, where they can't rub off.
Trusted with family archives
Umberdosh Restoration
We digitise family collections by hand from a home studio in Cambridgeshire — archival-grade scans, originals returned tracked and insured, and a fixed rate card so you know exactly what you're paying for.
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