What to record when there isn't much time

Q: How do I record someone in a hospital or hospice?

Ask the nurses when the quietest and clearest hour is, and whether the oxygen concentrator can be moved further from the bed. Put the phone on a folded towel about 25 cm away rather than holding it, put it on airplane mode, and keep sessions to twenty minutes. Ask permission first and let the recording capture the answer.

Q: Is ninety seconds of someone's voice really worth anything?

Yes. Ninety seconds contains the accent, the pace, the pauses and the way they say a name, and none of that is recoverable from photographs, letters or anybody's memory.

Q: What if they are too ill to talk for long?

Do it in one-minute pieces across several days. Record them saying a name, agreeing with something, laughing, answering a question with one word. Short fragments of a real voice are worth more than a long recording that exhausted somebody.

Record the voice first, even if it is only ninety seconds. Then record the facts only they hold: who is in the photographs, names, spellings, where things are. Stories come third. A phone on a folded towel is enough; MemoriesBox can wait.

Facts on this page verified August 17, 2026

If you have five minutes right now

Take out your phone. Open the voice recorder. Press record. Ask them to say their name, where they were born and the year, and then one sentence to a person you name. Stop. That file is now the most valuable thing on your phone.

Everything else on this page is an expansion of that, in the order it matters. There is nothing to buy and nothing to sign up for, and you do not need to read to the end before you start.

The order

The mistake almost everyone makes is starting with the stories. Stories are the most rewarding thing to record and the least urgent, because a good story usually exists in three other people as well. The voice does not. The names in the photographs do not.

Priority	What	Why it is first	Time needed
1	The voice itself	It exists nowhere else and cannot be reconstructed	90 seconds
2	The facts only they hold	Nobody else can supply them at any price	20–40 minutes
3	The stories	Often partly held by siblings, cousins, friends	As long as you have
4	The ordinary sounds	Laughing, saying your name, the way they answer the phone	Ongoing, free

If you get through one, you have done something real. If you get through two, you have done the part that cannot be redone.

The steps

1. Get ninety seconds of the voice, today

Not a good ninety seconds. Any ninety seconds. Phone, voice recorder app, red button, and ask for four things:

Their full name, and their mother's full name.
Where and when they were born.
One sentence to a named person: Say something to Anna. She's four.
Anything they want to say. Then stop talking and let the silence run for ten seconds before you press stop.

Do it in the room they are already in, with whatever noise is already there. Do not go and find a better room. Do not wait for a better day. A ninety-second recording made in a hospital corridor with a television on is a recording; a perfect one planned for next week frequently is not.

2. Get it off the phone before you do anything else

Email the file to yourself and to one other person in the family, today. A phone is a single point of failure and phones get dropped, wiped, lost and handed back to the network. Two copies in two places takes ninety seconds and it is the difference between having this and nearly having had it. The full method is at what to do with the recordings afterwards.

3. Record the facts only they hold

This is the session that cannot be recreated by anybody else, ever. Treat it as a checklist, not a conversation, and keep recording throughout.

The photographs. Get a box of them onto the bed or the table. For each one: who is this, where, roughly when, who took it. Number the backs in pencil so the audio can be matched later. If you do only one thing from this page, do this.
Names and spellings. Full names, maiden names, patronymics, the name of the village, what it was called before, how the family name was spelled before a border changed it.
Pronunciation. Have them say the family name and the place names out loud. Spelling does not carry sound.
Who is related to whom. Draw the family tree while they watch and let them correct it. Record the correcting.
Family medical history. Who had what, at what age. Unglamorous and genuinely useful to your children.
Where things are. Documents, deeds, the safe, the plot, the box in the attic, and who knows about the box.
Recipes. Not the ingredients. How long, how hot, how you know when it is ready, whose it was.
Songs and prayers. Whatever they can still sing without thinking about it.

Do not ask for passwords or account numbers on a recording. That is a conversation for a solicitor or a notary, not for an audio file that will be emailed around a family.

4. Then, and only then, ask for the stories

Now you can have the conversation you actually wanted. Twenty minutes at a time, one person in the room. Ask about places and objects rather than feelings, and wait five seconds after every answer, because the good part arrives in the second half of a silence. The method in full is at how to record your parents' life story.

If there is time for three questions, make them these: Where was the front door of the house you grew up in? · What is the thing you are proudest of that nobody knows about? · Is there anything you have been waiting for someone to ask you?

5. Keep the recorder running for the ordinary things

The clips families play most often are almost never the interview. They are thirty seconds of somebody laughing, the way they say your name, the way they answer the telephone, a bar of a song hummed while doing something else. None of it can be requested and all of it can be caught, if the recorder is running while the tea is made.

6. Ask the nurses, if you are in a hospital or a hospice

Say what you are doing and ask when the best hour is. They will know: when the medication makes them clearest, when the ward is quietest, when the round happens. Ask whether the oxygen concentrator can be moved further from the bed. Hospice teams do this work constantly and many will help you set it up. Asking costs nothing and it usually improves the recording more than any equipment would.

When to stop

Stop before they are tired. Stop the moment they say enough. Stop if the recording is costing them something the recording is not worth.

There is a version of this in which a family spends the last weeks running an archive project, and it is not a good version. If it is a choice between recording an hour and sitting with them for an hour, sit with them. The ninety seconds from step one already means you did not lose the voice, and that was the part actually at risk.

What usually goes wrong

People start with the stories and run out of time. They record two beautiful hours about the war and never find out who the woman in the photograph is. Facts first, story second.

The only copy is on one phone. After a death, that phone gets handed round, locked, restored, or returned to the network. Email the file to yourself the day you make it.

Everyone waits to be asked. Every person in a family assumes another one is doing this. Usually nobody is. Say in the group message that you are recording, and ask whether anyone objects.

The equipment gets in the way. Nobody here needs a microphone on a stand. A phone on a folded towel, 25 cm away, airplane mode on. The rest is at getting clean audio in an ordinary room.

Someone films it. A camera makes the visible effects of illness the permanent record, and it changes how a person behaves far more than a microphone does. Audio is kinder, and audio is what gets replayed.

Nobody asks permission. Ask, get the yes, and let the recording capture it. It takes four seconds. If the answer is no, there is a guide for that too, and taking notes is a real answer.

What to ask

If there is time for eight questions, these eight. The second column is what to say after the answer.

Ask	Then ask
Say your name, and your mother's name, for the recording.	And how is it really spelled?
Who is this in the photograph?	Who took it?
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?
What is the thing you are proudest of that nobody knows about?	Why did you never say?
What would you like to say to Anna, who won't remember you?	(Say nothing. Let it run.)

More at questions to ask before it's too late and the first twenty minutes.

Free ways to do all of this

Every step above can be done at no cost, and for a lot of families that is the right answer.

Your phone. Voice Memos on an iPhone, Recorder or the built-in voice recorder on Android. Set Settings → Voice Memos → Audio Quality → Lossless first.
A phone call, recorded on a second device. If you are far away, this is the whole method: how to record a phone call with a parent, consent rules by country included.
A voicemail you already have. Save it as a file today: how to save a voicemail forever.
StoryCorps. Free, and it has recorded more than 700,000 people since 2003, with the archive held at the Library of Congress. For a family that wants this done without a company involved, it is a good answer.
Your hospice or palliative care team. Many run life-story or legacy work already. Ask.

Questions people ask

What should you record first when someone is dying?

The voice, even if it is only ninety seconds: their name, where and when they were born, and one sentence to a named person. Then the facts nobody else holds — who is in the photographs, names, spellings, where documents are. Stories come third, because stories usually survive in other people and the voice does not.

How do I record someone in a hospital or hospice?

Ask the nurses when the quietest and clearest hour is, and ask whether the oxygen concentrator can be moved further from the bed. Put the phone on a folded towel about 25 cm away rather than holding it, put it on airplane mode, and keep sessions to twenty minutes. Ask their permission first and let the recording capture the answer.

Is ninety seconds of someone's voice really worth anything?

Yes. It is the difference between a family that can hear how someone spoke and a family that cannot. Ninety seconds contains the accent, the pace, the pauses and the way they say a name, and none of that is recoverable from photographs, letters or anybody's memory.

What if they are too ill to talk for long?

Then do it in one-minute pieces across several days, and do not treat that as second best. Record them saying a name, agreeing with something, laughing, answering a question with one word. Short fragments of a real voice are worth more than a long recording that exhausted somebody.

Do the free version first — a phone, or StoryCorps, which has recorded 700,000 people since 2003 into an archive at the Library of Congress. If your family later wants that voice kept and askable, that is what MemoriesBox is for, hosted in the EU. It is not what today is for.