Guides

Preserving family history: a practical guide

Family history isn't a genealogy chart. It's the small stories that would otherwise vanish.

Every family loses stories, usually one funeral at a time. The good news: preserving them is not complicated. You need three habits — capture, organize, and safeguard — and enough stubbornness to keep at it for a season. This guide walks through each one.

1. Capture stories while people are here

Documents are easy to find later. Voices are not. Start with the oldest generation and work down. You don't need a studio — a phone recorder is fine — and you don't need every question. You need a chair, a warm drink, and thirty minutes at a time.

• Record audio, not just notes. Tone and pauses carry meaning.
• Interview one person at a time. Groups edit each other.
• Use objects as prompts — a wedding ring, a recipe card, an old key.
• Follow up. The second answer is usually the honest one.

2. Gather the artifacts

Once you're recording stories, the physical objects start to make sense. Ask families to bring one shoebox of photos or letters to your next gathering. Scan them at 600 DPI (photos) or 300 DPI (documents). Label every scan on the spot; unlabeled files pile up faster than you think.

• Photos: scan the back too — that's where the notes live.
• Letters: transcribe the ones no one can read anymore.
• Recipes: photograph the card, then rewrite it in plain text.
• Video tapes and reels: digitize before the tape rots (VHS lifespan is 15–25 years).

3. Organize by person, then by decade

Genealogy software organizes by lineage. That's fine for a chart, terrible for a story. Sort your files by person (one folder each) with subfolders by decade. Give every file a short caption: who, when, where, and one detail that makes it worth keeping.

4. Safeguard with the 3-2-1 rule

Three copies. Two different kinds of storage. One off-site. That's the standard archivists use. In practice: one folder on your computer, one on an external drive kept in a drawer, one in a cloud service (iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox — pick one). Test yearly that you can still open the files.

5. Turn it into something readable

A hard drive full of scans is not a story. At some point you have to write. Even a short booklet — twenty pages, six photos, a family tree, and three interview transcripts — is a gift no descendant will delete. That's the entire idea behind Your One Story: it takes the recordings and shapes them into printable chapters, so the archive becomes a book.

Common mistakes

• Waiting for a big project. The right project is thirty minutes on a Tuesday.
• Trusting one drive. Hard drives fail; the question is when.
• Skipping the captions. An unlabeled photo becomes a mystery in one generation.
• Never sharing. Something the family reads is preserved. Something in a drawer isn't.

Frequently asked questions