Free guides
Do it yourself. I would rather you did than didn’t.
Everything below is what I actually do, written out so you can do it without me. No email required, nothing to sign up for.
If you get stuck, or you finish and realise you want it written properly, I am here. But most families can make a real start on their own, and the worst outcome is that nobody starts at all.
Guide one
How to interview an elderly relative.
The single mistake almost everybody makes is going straight at the big thing. “Tell me about the war.” “Tell me about your father.” The door closes, politely, and it does not open again that afternoon.
Ask about an ordinary day instead. What was in the kitchen. Who walked you to school. What the street sounded like at night. What did your mother’s hands look like. Where did you sit at the table, and who sat where.
The ordinary day is unguarded, because nobody has rehearsed a defence of it. And the hard thing is almost always sitting inside it — it arrives sideways, by itself, usually about forty minutes in, and usually while they are describing something else entirely.
Record the voice
A transcript preserves information. A recording preserves a person. Your phone is good enough. Start today rather than when you have better equipment, because there is no version of this where waiting helps.
Write down what you know first
Before you interview anybody, write your own half-memories down. They are primary source material, and they will prompt the questions you would never have thought to ask.
Ask twice, years apart
People answer differently at seventy than at eighty-five, and both answers are true. If you have the years, use them.
Let the silence run
The most useful thing in an interview is the pause you do not fill. Count to five before you speak again. Most of what I have ever been told came after a silence I did not interrupt.
Guide two
What to do when they will not talk about it.
Refusal is the normal case, not the exception, and it is almost never stubbornness. It is protection — of you, usually, more than of themselves.
Do not negotiate with it. Go around it. Ask about the years before, or the years after, or the people rather than the events. Ask what somebody wore. Ask who was funny. Ask what the boat smelled like. A person who cannot describe a camp can very often describe a cousin.
And accept an incomplete answer as an answer. “I do not want to talk about that” is itself a fact about the family, and it belongs in the history. Write it down as what it is.
Guide three
Caption your photographs this week.
An unlabelled photograph becomes anonymous in exactly one generation. Yours are on that clock right now, and the person who could still name the faces is the reason it is urgent.
Do it out loud
Sit with the box and a voice recorder rather than a pen. It is faster, they will say more, and you get the tone of voice as well as the name.
Write on the back in pencil
Never pen, never adhesive labels. Soft pencil, light pressure, on the lower edge. Names, place, year even if approximate.
“About 1952” is a date
Approximate is infinitely better than blank. Write “probably Montréal, probably the early fifties” rather than leaving it clean.
Photograph the backs too
When you scan, scan both sides. Inscriptions, studio stamps and pencil notes are often the only surviving evidence of where a picture came from.
Guide four
Write “we do not know.”
The strongest instinct when writing family history is to smooth the gaps — to guess a year, to assume a reason, to give a story an ending it never had. Resist all of it.
A history with honest gaps is worth more than a tidy one, for a reason that only becomes clear later: your grandchildren will trust the parts you claimed to know precisely because you admitted the parts you did not. A single invented detail contaminates everything around it.
Write “we do not know why she left in the spring rather than the autumn.” Write “nobody now remembers his mother’s name.” Those sentences are not failures. They are the most honest thing in the document, and one day somebody may be able to fill them in.
Or send me what you have.
If you would rather see what this looks like written properly before you decide anything: send me up to 250 words about one person, and for the those who write during open seasons I will shape it into a finished passage and send it back. No fee.
New preparation tools
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The Resource Library now includes a PDF preparation guide for each kind of story, plus a mixer-style tool for setting tone, emotional depth, humour, historical context, privacy boundaries and more.
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