Recording before dementia takes the details

What this page is

A practical guide for a family in which someone has been diagnosed, or in which somebody has started to notice things. It is written to be useful whether or not you ever buy anything, and there is nothing to sign up for in order to read it.

7.4 million Americans aged 65 and over are living with Alzheimer's in 2026, and the figure is projected to reach about 13.8 million by 2060 (Alzheimer's Association, 2026 Facts and Figures). Most families in that number are not in a crisis. They are in a long, ordinary stretch of time in which some things are still easy and some have started to take longer, and that stretch is where nearly all of the useful recording gets done.

We are not a clinical service and nothing here is medical advice. Your neurologist, your memory clinic, the Alzheimer's Association in the United States and the Alzheimer's Society or Dementia UK in the United Kingdom all publish material written by people qualified to write it.

Before you start

Ask them properly, and ask early. Not as a reaction to a diagnosis, which reads as an emergency, but as a plain request: I'd like to record you talking about the old house, twenty minutes at a time. It's for Anna. Say who will have it, and that they can hear it and have anything deleted.

Ask on a good day, in the morning, with one person in the room. Say what it is for once and then stop explaining, because repeated explanation reads as pressure. And record the first session soon rather than well: a short, badly recorded conversation this month is worth more than an excellent one still being planned in the spring.

What is usually still there, and what goes first

This varies between people and between conditions. As a general pattern in Alzheimer's disease, recent memory is affected earlier and more heavily than remote memory, so the 1950s often remain vivid long after last Tuesday has gone. Autobiographical memory research has found for decades that adults recall the period roughly between ages ten and thirty more richly than any other — the reminiscence bump — and that period also tends to persist. Music, familiar routines and emotional response frequently outlast names and dates.

The practical consequence: record early life first, and record it in the language it happened in. If your mother grew up speaking Ukrainian and switched to English at thirty, ask in Ukrainian. See questions about leaving one country for another.

Record the unrecoverable things first

Stories can sometimes be reconstructed from other people. Facts held by exactly one person cannot. Do these first, in one sitting if you can, and treat it as a checklist rather than an interview.

1. Photographs. Sit with a box of them and ask of each one: who is this, where, what year, who took it. Record the audio while you do it, and number the backs in pencil so the audio can be matched to them later. This is the highest-value hour available to any family and almost nobody does it.
2. Names and spellings. Full names, maiden names, patronymics, the name of the village, the name the village had before, how the family name was spelled before a border changed it.
3. Pronunciation. Have them say the family name, the village and the grandparents' names out loud. Spelling does not carry sound.
4. Recipes. Not the ingredients — how long, how hot, how you know when it is ready, whose recipe it was.
5. Songs, prayers and rhymes. Whatever they sing without thinking. This survives remarkably late and is almost never recorded.
6. Family medical history. Who had what, at what age. Unglamorous, and genuinely useful to your children.
7. Where things are. Documents, deeds, the plot, the box in the attic, and who knows about the box.

Then record the life

Once the unrecoverable things are safe, do the ordinary interview described in how to record your parents' life story, with four changes. Shorter: twenty to thirty minutes, stopping before they are tired rather than when they are. Earlier in the day: confusion and agitation are commonly worse in the late afternoon and evening, a pattern care staff call sundowning, so mid-morning is usually the best hour available. Quieter: background noise costs a person with dementia far more than it costs you, so one room, one person, no television and no third relative adding corrections. No quizzing, which has its own section below.

How to ask when memory is going

The rules change. Some of these will feel wrong if you have interviewed anyone before.

• Never say "do you remember". It converts a conversation into a test, and a test failed in front of a child is humiliating. Say "tell me about" instead.
• Never correct a date, a name or a fact. Whether it was 1953 or 1955 does not matter. What matters is that they are still willing to talk to you next week.
• Never argue with a version of reality. If your father says his mother is coming to visit, do not explain that she died in 1981. Ask what she is like, and you will get a description of his mother, which is what you wanted.
• Ask one thing at a time, in a short sentence, then wait longer than feels natural. Word-finding takes time, and filling the silence takes the sentence away from them.
• Use objects and photographs, not abstract questions. A cup, a tool, a coat. Physical prompts do work that questions cannot.
• Follow the feeling, not the fact. If a story is muddled but they are enjoying it, stay in it. The recording is not an evidence file.
• Let the same story be told again. The third telling often has a detail the first two did not.

This is an established practice, not an invention

Recording someone's life story in the context of dementia is not a novel idea and not a product category. It is called reminiscence therapy or life-story work, and it has been used in dementia care for decades.

Reminiscence therapy is the structured use of prompts — photographs, music, objects, familiar smells — to encourage a person to recall and talk about their past. A Cochrane systematic review of reminiscence therapy for dementia (Woods and colleagues, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2018) found some evidence of small improvements in quality of life, communication and cognition, differing by setting and format, and the review authors were explicit that the quality of the underlying evidence was low. That is the honest summary: established practice with modest and uneven evidence behind it, not a treatment.

Life-story work is the related practice of assembling a record of who the person is, so that people caring for them know who they are dealing with. NICE guideline NG97 on dementia in England recommends considering group reminiscence therapy for people living with mild to moderate dementia. The Alzheimer's Society's This is Me leaflet is a free, widely used template, designed to travel with a person into hospital or residential care.

If you do nothing else from this page, fill in This is Me with them and put a copy in the bag that would go to hospital. It costs nothing and it is the most useful piece of paper a family in this situation can hold.

MemoriesBox is not therapy and does not treat anything. What it does is keep the audio.

Consent, when capacity is the question

This is the part most companies in this market avoid, so here it is plainly.

Consent has to come from the person, at a point where they understand what they are agreeing to. Capacity is not all-or-nothing: in England and Wales the Mental Capacity Act 2005 treats it as specific to a decision and to a moment, and presumes it is present unless the opposite is established. Across the EU the framework is national and varies. For a family the questions are simpler than the law: does this person understand what a recording is, who will hear it, and that they can say no? Could they still say no, and would you notice if they did?

If the answer is yes, ask them, get the yes, and record it.

If the answer is no, you can still record. A family recording a family member is an ordinary private activity, and audio of your mother in her own kitchen is yours to make and keep. What changes is what may be built from it afterwards. MemoriesBox only ever builds a voice from recordings a person made themselves, knowingly, while alive and taking part. Where someone can no longer understand what they are agreeing to, that consent is not present, and the honest answer is to keep the recordings as recordings and build nothing that speaks in their voice. That position is set out in full at we only record people who agreed to be recorded.

Two things make that workable in practice rather than in principle. Every recording in MemoriesBox starts only when the person presses the button themselves, and the time of each one is kept, so "she agreed, that day" is a fact in the record and not a memory of a conversation. And recording never builds a voice on its own: the voice model is made only when someone presses "Create my digital self" in Settings → Voice. A family can record for a year and never press it, and the archive is complete without it. The written policy, including what a legal representative can ask us to do, is on /trust/consent.

The uncomfortable version of this advice is that consent is easiest to obtain, and clearest, early. That is a reason to have the conversation now rather than a reason to hurry anyone.

What usually goes wrong

The session runs too long. Twenty good minutes and a cup of tea beats fifty minutes with a tired ending. A bad ending is what they remember about the whole thing.

Two relatives correct each other, or the television is on. One person in the room, and nothing else making a sound.

Someone says "do you remember". Agree in advance, with everyone involved, that the phrase is not used.

You film it. A camera changes behaviour far more than a microphone does, and it makes the visible effects of illness the permanent record. Audio is kinder, and audio is the part families actually replay.

You wait for a better time. The good days do not become more frequent. This is the only sentence on this page that is about time, and it is not a deadline — it is a reason to have one short conversation this month rather than a plan for a long one in the spring.

Nobody backs anything up. Three copies: your computer, a drive in the house, a copy with a sibling elsewhere. See what to do with the recordings afterwards.

What to ask

Short, concrete, and never about remembering.

More at questions that still work when memory is going and questions about childhood.

Questions people ask

When should you start recording a parent with dementia?

As soon as the idea has occurred to you, and in short sessions rather than one long one. Early-stage conversation is usually the richest, and the facts that only that person holds — names in photographs, spellings, recipes, songs — are the ones to capture first because nobody else can supply them later.

What should you not say to someone with dementia when recording?

Do not say "do you remember", do not correct a date or a name, and do not argue with their version of events. All three turn a conversation into a test. Ask them to tell you about something instead, ask one thing at a time, and wait longer than feels comfortable for the answer.

Does reminiscence therapy actually work?

The evidence is real but modest. A Cochrane review of reminiscence therapy for dementia (Woods et al., 2018) found some improvement in quality of life, communication and cognition, varying by setting and format, and rated the quality of the evidence as low. It is established practice in dementia care, and it is not a treatment for the disease.

Can you record someone who can no longer consent?

A family can record a family member privately, and keeping audio of your own mother is an ordinary thing to do. What should not happen is building a synthetic voice from someone who could not understand what they were agreeing to. MemoriesBox builds a voice only from recordings the person made knowingly while alive and taking part.

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Related: All the guides · Questions that still work when memory is going · What to record when there isn't much time · How to record your parents' life story · We only record people who agreed to be recorded

Start with the free path. A phone on a folded towel records everything on this page at no cost, and StoryCorps has recorded more than 700,000 people since 2003 into an archive held at the Library of Congress. If you later want the voice kept and askable by the family, that is what MemoriesBox does, from the EU.