Distance helps
Grandparents are often far more forthcoming with a grandchild than they ever were with their own children - and more forthcoming still with an interviewer who is neither.
For grandparents
Family memory has a range of about three generations.
Most people can tell you something about their grandparents and almost nothing about their great-grandparents. Where the stories stop is not where the family started - it is where somebody stopped asking.
The window that is open right now
Try this. Name your eight great-grandparents. Most people manage two or three, and can say almost nothing about any of them - and yet every one of those people was, within living memory of somebody, an ordinary person with a job and a temper and a favourite chair.
They were not lost to time. They were lost in one generation, because the person who knew them was never recorded.
Your grandparents are, right now, the last living witnesses to that generation. Recording them is not only about their life; it is the only remaining route to their parents’ lives. After that, it stops being memory and becomes genealogy - names, dates, a census return, and no idea what anybody was like.
What a grandchild actually wants to know
Not, it turns out, the dates. Grandchildren consistently want the texture of a world they cannot picture:
- What the house was like. Whether there was a telephone, and who else used it.
- What they did all day when they were the age the grandchild is now.
- What their own grandparents were like - a jump of five generations in one answer.
- What frightened them, and what turned out not to be worth the fright.
- What they thought would happen to the world, and how wrong they were about it.
- How they met, told by both of them, disagreeing about the details.
Three reasons this works better for grandparents than for anyone else
They have the time
This is a project that suits somebody who is no longer working. Ten minutes here and half an hour there, over months, produces a genuinely substantial book.
Long memory outlasts short
Childhood recollection is often vivid and intact well after last Tuesday has gone. The years worth recording are frequently the ones that are still perfectly available.
How it works for someone in their eighties
The whole product is designed around this person, not adapted for them. Questions are spoken aloud and shown in large type. Answering means talking. Buttons are big enough for an unsteady hand, and there is a simplified phone mode with almost nothing on the screen but the question.
Nothing is required, nothing expires, and no mistake costs anything. Skip a question and it goes away. Stop mid-sentence and it is saved.
Making it a family project
Grandchildren can be invited to add photographs and their own memories - a genuinely good way to involve teenagers, who tend to be far more interested in this than anyone expects. Everything they contribute waits for your grandparent’s approval first.
At the end there is a book: a PDF you can print, or have printed and bound. It is a common thing for a family to give every grandchild a copy the following Christmas, with the recordings available alongside it so they can hear him tell it.
If time is genuinely short
Start anyway, and start with one question. A single finished chapter in your grandmother’s voice is worth more than a perfect plan for a project that does not begin. Do not attempt chronological order; ask about the thing she has always talked about, and let Rosie follow it.
Keep reading
They are the last person who can answer these questions.
Start with one, this week.
30-day free trial. No credit card to begin.