How to do this well
Open the voice recorder on your phone, stand it on a folded towel 25 cm away, and ask where the front door of their childhood house was. Record forty-five minutes, back it up the same day, repeat next week. These MemoriesBox guides work with any recorder, including ours.
Facts on this page verified
What these guides are
Practical instructions for recording someone in your family, written to be useful whether or not you ever pay us anything. Nothing here is gated, and several of them end by pointing you at something free.
47% of Americans regret not recording or documenting a conversation with someone who has since died, and 59% have never done it at all (YouGov, June 2022, n=6,090). The second number is the one worth sitting with. Almost nobody fails at this because the equipment was wrong. They fail because the recording never started.
Which guide you need
| If this is your situation | Read |
|---|---|
| You want to do it properly, from the beginning | How to record your parents' life story |
| There is a voicemail on your phone you are frightened of losing | How to save a voicemail forever |
| They have said no, or gone quiet about it | Recording someone who doesn't want to be recorded |
| You live too far away to be in the room | How to record a phone call with a parent |
| Somebody has been diagnosed, or you have started to notice things | Recording before dementia takes the details |
| There is not much time left | What to record when there isn't much time |
| It sounds terrible and you do not know why | Getting clean audio in an ordinary room |
| You want to know what this whole category is, before choosing anything in it | What is a digital legacy service? |
The method, in six steps
Every guide here is a variation on the same six things.
1. Ask properly, a week in advance
One sentence, with who it is for. I'd like to record you talking about the old house, twenty minutes at a time, for Anna. Never record anyone secretly. See we only record people who agreed to be recorded.
2. Take the noise out of the room
Unplug the fridge, take the battery out of the ticking clock, shut the windows, put every phone on airplane mode.
3. Put the phone on a folded towel, 25 cm away
Not in your hand, not bare on the table. Record thirty seconds and listen back on headphones before you begin.
4. Start with a place, not a year
Where was the front door of the house you grew up in? A house is physical and cannot be answered with "fine". Rooms produce people, and people produce events.
5. Wait five seconds after every answer
The hardest instruction in any of these guides. The good material arrives in the second half of a silence.
6. Back it up the same day, in three places
Your computer, a drive in the house, and a cloud account or a relative in another house. After session one, not session ten.
Eight questions that work almost anywhere
| Ask | Then ask |
|---|---|
| Where was the front door of the house you grew up in? | What was the first room you came into? |
| What did the kitchen smell like on a Sunday? | Who was doing the cooking? |
| What was the first thing you bought with your own money? | What did it cost? |
| Who taught you the thing you are best at? | What did they say while they were teaching you? |
| Where were you when you met her? | What did she say to you first? |
| What was the hardest year? | Who helped, and did you ever tell them? |
| Is there anything you have been waiting for someone to ask you? | (Say nothing. Count to five.) |
The full sets are at what to actually ask, including the first twenty minutes and what to ask when they say there's nothing to tell.
What usually goes wrong
They answer in one sentence. The question was too big. Go smaller and more physical.
They tell the polished version. Let it finish, then ask what happened the day before it.
Two children interview at once. That produces a family conversation, not a life story.
The audio is unusable. The fridge, a hand over the microphone, or voice activation chopping the first syllable off every sentence.
Nobody backs anything up. A recording that exists in one place is only partly recorded.
You wait for a better week. There is no better week, and next year is where most of these projects go.
If you never buy anything from us
Which is a perfectly good outcome, and these guides are written for it. Your phone does all of this free — on an iPhone, set Settings → Voice Memos → Audio Quality to Lossless first. A handheld recorder costs $40–110 and has one button. And StoryCorps has recorded more than 700,000 people since 2003, with the archive held at the Library of Congress; their questions and their app cost nothing.
Questions people ask
What is the best way to record my parents' life story?
In sessions of about an hour, a week apart, phone on a folded towel 25 cm away, starting with the house they grew up in rather than the year they were born. Back up the same day. Full method at how to record your parents' life story.
Do I need to buy equipment to record a family interview?
No. The phone in your pocket, placed properly and left alone, is better for this than a $500 microphone, which needs a laptop and a quiet room and turns a conversation into an interview.
Is it legal to record a family member?
If you ask and they agree, yes, everywhere. Without consent it varies sharply — in Germany §201 StGB makes it a criminal offence even for a participant in the conversation. Rules by country and by US state are at how to record a phone call with a parent.
How long should a recording session be?
Forty-five minutes to an hour in a room, thirty to forty on the phone, twenty when someone is ill or tired. Stop while they still want to keep going.
Related: What to actually ask · What to do with the recordings afterwards · Where your recordings actually live · What happens to your recordings if MemoriesBox shuts down
If you would rather not run the conversation yourself, MemoriesBox does it as a long guided interview, keeps the person's own voice, and lets your family ask it questions later. $139 a year, first 14 days free, hosted in the EU. Start here.