For sons and daughters
Record your parents’ life stories
Not with a recorder and a list of questions on a Sunday afternoon - with an interviewer who knows what to ask second, and who will still be patient at the fortieth question.
Why this gets put off
Almost everyone intends to do this. Very few people manage it, and the reasons are worth naming, because they are not laziness.
You don’t know what to ask. “Tell me about your childhood” is too big a question to answer. It produces a shrug, or the three stories you have already heard at every Thanksgiving since 1994.
The recorder changes the room. The moment a phone goes on the table, a parent who talks freely all afternoon begins delivering testimony. They get self-conscious about repeating themselves, worry about being boring, and answer in short, careful sentences.
You are their child. This is the one nobody expects. There are things a parent will tell a stranger with a microphone that they will not tell the person they raised - about their own parents, about money, about the years before you existed. And there are things you will not ask, because you are afraid of the answer or afraid of upsetting them.
It never becomes urgent until it is too late. This is a project that lives permanently just beyond next month, until the day it becomes impossible.
Why home-made interviews stall
Families that do get started usually stall in one of two places. Either the recordings pile up - nine hours of audio nobody will ever listen through, with no index and no way to find the story about the coal stove - or the questionnaire runs out, because a list of fifty questions is fifty separate conversations that never build on each other.
What is missing in both cases is the same thing: somebody listening closely enough to ask the second question.
What the second question does
What was your father like when you were growing up?
Dad was a quiet man. He worked all the time. He served during the war, although he almost never talked about it…
You mentioned that your father rarely talked about the war. Do you remember the first time he ever told you something about it?
That is not on anybody’s list of questions to ask your parents. It exists only because of what he said thirty seconds earlier - and it is the question that gets you the story about your grandfather that nobody in your family has ever heard.
How MyLifeMemoir helps
Your parent talks; nobody writes anything
Rosie asks a question out loud and in large type. Your mother or father answers by talking. There is no keyboard, no form, and nothing that has to be finished before they can stop. A session can be ten minutes.
The follow-ups come from what they actually said
Rosie reads the answer and offers the next questions from inside it. That is the difference between an interview and a questionnaire, and it is why people who “don’t have anything interesting to say” end up talking for an hour.
The interviewer is not their child
This matters more than it sounds. Rosie has no history with your father, no feelings to protect, and no memory of the argument in 1987. People are often more candid with her than they would be with you - and you get to read the result.
The recording keeps their voice
Every answer can keep the audio it came from. Years from now the memoir can be read and heard: the pause before the funny part, the accent, the particular way your mother says your name. More about why that matters.
Photographs get their stories attached
The shoebox of photographs is only useful while somebody alive can say who is in them. Upload them and record the answer to “who is this, and what was happening?” while the person who knows is still the one telling you.
Everyone else can contribute
Brothers, sisters, grandchildren and old friends can be invited to add their own photographs and memories - all of it held for your parent’s approval before it appears. It is their memoir, not a family committee.
Start with the easy years
If you take one piece of advice from this page: do not open with legacy. Open with childhood - a house, a school, a job, a car. Easy memories are how somebody gets comfortable being recorded, and the hard ones tend to arrive on their own about forty minutes in. The full guide to recording a parent is here.
What families ask us
My father says he has nothing interesting to say.
Nearly all of them do. It is almost never true, and it is almost never the real objection - the real one is usually “I don’t want to be a project”. Ask him one specific question about something ordinary (the first car, the job he had at nineteen) rather than asking him to tell his life story. The ordinary questions are the ones that open up.
My mother is not comfortable with technology.
She needs to press one large button and talk. There is a simplified phone mode with almost nothing on the screen but the question. Most families do the first session together - you hold the tablet, she talks - and by the third question she has forgotten the device is there.
What if my parent has memory problems?
Long-term memory often outlasts short-term memory by years, so childhood and early-adult stories can be very much available even when yesterday is not. Keep sessions short, follow whatever thread they offer rather than correcting the chronology, and record sooner rather than later. If a question distresses them, skip it - nothing is required.
Can I do this from another state?
Yes. Your parent records at their own pace on their own device, and you read and hear the chapters when they share them. A great many families are spread across the country; this works better remotely than a once-a-year visit with a recorder ever did.
Who owns what my parent records?
Your parent does. It is their account and their memoir; they decide what is kept and who sees it, and they can export the whole thing as a PDF whenever they want. Our full privacy commitment.
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