Guide
Family History Preservation: A Complete Guide
How to digitise old photographs, record oral histories and organise a digital family archive that survives for generations.
1. Digitising old photographs
Prints, slides and negatives fade, curl and stick together. Digitising is the highest-value first step because it converts a decaying object into a file you can copy endlessly.
- Scan flat prints at 600 dpi for standard viewing, and 1200 dpi for anything smaller than 6x4in or that you may want to enlarge.
- Scan negatives and slides at 2400-3200 dpi — the original film holds far more detail than the print ever did.
- Save an untouched TIFF or PNG master, then work only on JPEG copies. Never edit over your master file.
- Photograph album pages as a whole before removing anything: the layout, order and handwritten captions are part of the record.
- Capture the back of every print. Dates, names and studio stamps are often the only identification that exists.
2. Recording oral histories
A photograph shows a moment; a recorded voice explains it. Oral histories are the part of a family archive that disappears first and can never be reconstructed later.
- Record in short sessions of 30-45 minutes. Long interviews tire the storyteller and the stories get thinner.
- Use open questions: 'What did the kitchen smell like on a Sunday?' beats 'Did you enjoy your childhood?'.
- Sit in a small, soft room with the microphone about 30cm away. Carpets and curtains matter more than expensive equipment.
- Record audio at minimum; record video when the person is comfortable with it. Gestures carry meaning.
- Transcribe soon afterwards while names are still fresh, and note the date, place and who was present.
3. Organising the digital archive
An unsorted folder of 12,000 files is not an archive — it is a problem you have passed to your children. Structure is what makes a collection usable in fifty years.
- Name files consistently: YYYY-MM-DD_person-or-event_sequence. Sortable names survive every future software change.
- Group by family line or life chapter rather than by device or import date.
- Write the story down alongside the file. Context that lives only in your memory is not preserved.
- Keep three copies, on two types of media, with one copy off-site. This is the standard archivists use.
- Re-check your archive once a year: open a random sample of files and confirm they still open.
4. Keeping it alive across generations
Preservation fails at handover far more often than at storage. Decide now who inherits the archive and how they will reach it.
- Name a successor and tell them where the archive lives and how to unlock it.
- Prefer open, widely-read formats — JPEG, TIFF, PDF, MP3, MP4 — over proprietary ones.
- Share the archive while people are still alive to correct it; relatives will identify faces you cannot.
- Add to it steadily. A living archive that grows each year beats a perfect one finished once.
Preserve it inside a museum, not a folder
Memorivos turns photographs, recordings and stories into curated exhibits your family can walk through.