How to Record Your Parents' Life Story

This guide assumes you are doing it yourself, with a phone and an afternoon. All of it works without buying anything from anyone - including us.

1. Choose a setting that is not an occasion

The kitchen table beats the good room. Somewhere your parent sits normally, at a time of day when they are at their best - which for most people over seventy-five is the morning, not after dinner.

Two people, not six. An audience turns a conversation into a performance, and a performing parent tells you the polished anecdotes rather than the real ones. Turn the television off; ambient sound is far more intrusive on a recording than it is in the room.

Keep the first session to forty minutes. It is better to stop while everyone still wants to carry on than to grind to a halt after two hours and quietly never do it again.

2. Record the audio, always

Whatever else you do, record. Your memory of the conversation will be worse than you expect within a week, and the way something was said is a large part of what you are trying to keep.

A phone on the table between you is entirely adequate - modern phone microphones are better than the equipment most oral history projects used for decades. Put it face down on something soft, closer to them than to you, and check the storage before you start.

Say the date and who is speaking at the beginning of every recording. In ten years this thirty-second habit will be the difference between an archive and a folder of mystery files.

3. Begin with easy memories

Houses, schools, first jobs, first cars, what the walk to school was like. Concrete, physical, answerable. Nobody can respond to “tell me about your childhood” - it is too large a question to get hold of.

Save anything weighty for later sessions. A question about regret or loss in the first ten minutes gets a polite, closed answer, and having given one, people find it hard to reopen the subject.

4. Ask open questions about process

The most useful single technique in this guide: ask how something worked rather than how it felt.

• Not “what was the mill like?” but “what did you do from the moment you clocked on?”
• Not “how did you feel about your father?” but “what did he do for work, and did you ever go with him?”
• Not “was money tight?” but “what did the rent cost, and how did you pay it?”

Process questions have an order to them, so they are answerable. And the feeling arrives in the middle of the answer, unprompted, which is both more truthful and more moving than anything you would have got by asking for it.

5. Use follow-ups - this is the whole job

Everything above is preparation. The interview itself is almost entirely follow-up. Four questions do most of the work:

1. “What do you mean by that?” - on any phrase they threw away.
2. “Who else was there?” - turns an event into people.
3. “What happened next?” - most people stop one beat early.
4. “Can you describe it?” - puts furniture back in the room.

And leave the silences alone. Count to five before you fill a pause. The best material in most interviews arrives after a gap that felt uncomfortably long to the person asking.

6. Capture names, dates and spellings

Do this at the end of each session, not during - interrupting a story to spell a surname breaks the thread and people rarely recover it.

Ask for full names including maiden names, roughly when people were born and died, how each person was related, and the spelling of any place name. Also ask how a name is pronounced, and record them saying it. That is frequently the only place a family pronunciation exists.

7. Bring photographs in as prompts

Photographs are the best interview device there is, and they work best halfway through a session rather than at the start. Put one on the table and ask who is in it and what was happening.

Write the answer on the back in pencil, or photograph the picture and note it straight away. An unlabelled photograph is a countdown; the moment the last person who can name the faces is gone, it becomes decoration.

8. Organise as you go, not at the end

This is where most family projects actually die. Not at the recording stage - at the nine-hours-of-audio-and-no-index stage. Nobody, including you, will ever sit through it.

After each session, spend ten minutes doing three things:

• Name the file with the date and the subject.
• Write six bullet points of what is in it, with rough timings.
• Note the two or three things you want to ask about next time.

Transcribing is better still if you have the patience for it - and modern automatic transcription is good enough to give you a searchable draft in minutes.

9. Preserve the original voice

Keep the audio even after you have transcribed it, and keep it in an ordinary format (an MP3 or WAV file) in at least two places - one of them not in your house. Families lose far more recordings to dead formats, defunct apps and single copies than to any dramatic event.

A transcript preserves the facts. The recording preserves the pauses, the accent and the laugh, none of which text has any way of encoding. More on why that matters.

10. Share it while everyone is still around to enjoy it

Do not treat this as a posthumous project. Send the first chapter to your brother. Play a clip at a birthday. Give your parent something back within the first month.

It is a kindness to them - very few people ever get to see their own life taken seriously - and, practically, it is what keeps everybody involved enough for the project to continue past session three.

The four mistakes that end projects

1. Starting with the big questions. Legacy first, and the room closes.
2. Correcting them. The fastest way to end a session, permanently.
3. Making it a project with a deadline. Ten minutes on a Sunday for a year produces far more than a heroic afternoon that never gets scheduled.
4. Not organising as you go. The recordings that were never indexed might as well not have been made.