01
Record The Elders
One hour, one recorder, one relative. Ask about childhood, work, migration, love, loss and the ordinary weekday nobody thinks is worth keeping.
Start With What Cannot Be Recovered
Photographs will still be there next year. The person who can tell you who is standing on the left may not be. Preserving family history means working in order of loss: living memory first, fragile physical material second, everything else after.
The Six Steps
A sequence a family can complete over a few weekends rather than a lifetime.
02
Rescue The Fragile
Tapes, slides, negatives and water-damaged prints degrade fastest. Digitise those before the well-kept album.
03
Attach The Context
Names, relationships, places, approximate years. A photograph without context becomes a picture of strangers within two generations.
04
Fill The Gaps
Map the decades you hold and the ones you do not, then ask the relatives who can still close them.
05
Write It Down
Turn interviews into a readable life story, so descendants inherit a narrative rather than raw footage.
06
Arrange Succession
Decide now who inherits the collection, who may add to it, and what stays private.
Questions Worth Recording
Use these verbatim. They reliably open real stories.
- Describe the house you grew up in, room by room
- What did your parents and grandparents do for a living?
- How did you meet, and what do you remember of that day?
- What was the hardest year of your life, and how did it end?
- Which traditions came from where, and who started them?
- What did the family survive that no one talks about?
- What are you most proud of that nobody knows?
- What do you want a great-grandchild to know about you?
Preserving It Properly
Once gathered, family history needs conditions, copies and an heir.
- Keep prints cool, dark and dry — never the attic or the garage
- Digitise photographs at 600 dpi, documents at 300 dpi
- Keep the untouched original beside every restored version
- Hold at least three copies, in at least two locations
- Store names, dates and stories with the files, not in your head
- Name a guardian who will maintain the collection after you
Frequently Asked
How do I preserve family history before it is lost?
Start with people, not paper. Record an hour of conversation with the oldest living relatives, then digitise the oldest photographs, then name faces and approximate dates. Anything a living person can explain should be captured first, because that knowledge disappears permanently.
What questions should I ask an elderly relative?
Ask about the house they grew up in, the sounds and smells of it, what their parents did for work, how they met their partner, the hardest year of their life, a moment they are proud of, and what they would want a great-grandchild to know. Open questions produce stories; yes/no questions produce silence.
How should old photographs be stored?
Keep prints cool, dark, dry and out of the attic or basement, in acid-free sleeves, and digitise them at 600 dpi so the digital copy carries the detail. Store the digital copies in more than one place.
What is the biggest mistake families make?
Waiting. The second is keeping the material without the context — thousands of scans with no names, dates or stories attached, which leaves a later generation with pictures of strangers.
How does Memorivos help preserve family history?
It guides the interviews, restores damaged images, writes museum plaques with the who, where and when, groups everything into rooms a visitor can walk through, and builds in guardianship so the collection is inherited rather than lost.