How to Preserve Family Stories for Future Generations

What actually survives, and what does not

Look at what has come down to your family from a century ago. It is almost certainly printed photographs, a few documents, perhaps a letter - and essentially no information about any of it. You have the faces and not the names.

Meanwhile the things families recorded most enthusiastically in the last forty years - camcorder tapes, cassettes, discs, a website somebody built in 2004 - have fared far worse than the paper did. Digital material is not more durable than paper. It is morecopyable, which is a different property, and one that only helps if somebody actually copies it.

Six decisions determine which side of that line your family archive lands on.

1. Capture the person before the objects

The universal instinct is to begin by scanning photographs. It is the wrong order. The photographs are not going anywhere; the person who can explain them is the part with a deadline attached.

Interview first. The interview also tells you which objects matter, which saves you scanning four hundred pictures of a holiday nobody remembers.

2. Label everything, immediately

A photograph without a caption has a shelf life of exactly one generation. Write on the back in soft pencil, or better, record the answer while somebody is telling you: who is in it, roughly when, where, and what was happening.

For digital files, put the information in the filename as well as in any catalogue -1961-08-ridge-street-porch-aunt-mary.jpg survives being copied to a hard drive in twenty years. A note inside an app does not.

3. Choose formats that will still open

Boring, open, widely used formats beat clever ones every time. For a family archive that means: JPEG or TIFF for images, MP3 or WAV for audio, MP4 for video, PDF and plain text for documents.

Avoid anything that only opens inside one company’s product. If your family history lives in an app, the question to ask is: can I get it all out as ordinary files? If the answer is no, it is not preserved - it is deposited.

And print. A book on a shelf requires no format, no password and no electricity.

4. Three copies, two places

The archivists’ rule, simplified for a family: at least three copies, in at least two physical locations, at least one of which is not your house.

In practice: the working copy on your computer, a copy in cloud storage, and a copy on an external drive at your sister’s. Check the drive once a year - an unchecked backup is a hope, not a copy.

5. Build the index, or it is not an archive

This is the difference between an archive and a pile, and it is where most family projects fail. Nine hours of unindexed audio will never be listened to by anybody, including you.

An index does not have to be sophisticated. One document listing:

• what each recording is, when it was made, and who is speaking;
• a handful of timings so a story can be found;
• the people mentioned;
• where the files live.

Transcripts are better still - searchable, skimmable, and immune to the death of any audio format.

6. Name a custodian, and tell everyone

Archives are lost at handovers. Somebody dies, a house is cleared in a fortnight, and the box goes out because nobody in the skip-hire queue knew what it was.

Decide who holds the family archive, tell the rest of the family, write it down where it will be found, and distribute copies widely. Redundancy across relatives is the most reliable preservation strategy there has ever been - it is, after all, how the photographs you do still have survived.

If you only do one thing this month

Record one interview with the oldest person in your family, on a phone, and write six lines about what is in it. That single hour will likely outlast every other decision on this page, because it captures the one thing that genuinely cannot be reconstructed: somebody’s own account, in their own voice.