We went through my Great Aunt’s old photo album with her a few years before she passed at 101(!) We recorded the audio and scanned the whole photo album, so we now basically have a whole slideshow narrated by her going through her old photos. She was the last person in our family from her generation and there were people and places in that photo album that no one else would have been able to identify. At her memorial service, my brother took the raw material and edited together a five minute video presentation that included music, photos and her voice narrating. It was great at the service for everyone to have that contact with her voice again.

Both my father and my mother (divorced) have old 8mm film which I’ve recently digitized, and we’re now in the process of sitting down with them and informally recording their voiceovers with the old footage so we have a record of everyone and every place in the old footage.

We’ve also gotten subscriptions for my mother, father, and father-in-law to a service called storyworth that sends them a question a week via email and gives them a web form to answer the question in. They can also do more than one a week, select a different question if they don’t want to do the one they were sent, or make up their own question. At the end of a year, storyworth collects it all together and prints a book of all the generated material. Photos can also be added. It’s gone well, though their consistency has varied a bit. We’ve renewed all of their subscriptions for another year and we’re getting some great stories out of it.