Recording your Family History
The holidays often bring extended families together and may well give you a chance to be alone with an older relative for an hour or two. This is a chance to learn and record a major part of your family’s history. You’ll want a recording device. Apple iPhone’s come preload with the “Voice Memo” function in the “Extras” folder. Many other choices are available.
You’ll want to start by telling the date, place, and people taking the record followed by the full name and date and place of birth of the person recorded. You may wish to ask first about their parents, grandparents and other family predecessors. This may be your only chance to find out about them. In general, we just let the person talk but may ask questions about their schooling, places they’ve lived, major events and anecdotes. Creating a transcript is nice but very tedious. If submitting it to an archives, please create an index of names, events, places.
One of our members did this with their father-in-law a while back. Shortly after that man’s demise his wife needed to be moved from a large home with family pictures all over the walls to an assisted living facility with only a digital picture frame. These pics and the sound of her husband’s voice calmed the grieving widow. Copies of the digital data were given to her other children, one of which called it “the best gift she’d ever received”!