Recording family stories with simple equipment

Start with what you already own

The recordings that survive in family archives are rarely the ones made with the best equipment. They are the ones that actually got made. It is very easy to spend an afternoon researching microphones and an evening reading reviews, and then never quite getting round to sitting down with your aunt and pressing record. So begin with whatever you have: a smartphone, a cheap digital voice recorder, even a tablet propped against a mug of tea.

The quality you need is only the quality that lets you hear the voice clearly and understand the words. Anything beyond that is a bonus. Warmth, pauses, the clink of a teacup — these are part of the charm, not a fault to be fixed.

Smartphone or basic digital recorder?

Both will do the job well. A smartphone is usually the better choice for a first attempt, because it is already charged, already familiar, and already in your pocket when a story unexpectedly starts. A dedicated recorder has a couple of quiet advantages: it holds its charge for days, it will not ring halfway through a sentence, and it feels less like a phone and more like a piece of kit, which some older relatives find easier to take seriously.

• Smartphone: use the built-in voice memo or recorder function rather than a video, and put it in aeroplane mode so nothing interrupts you.
• Digital recorder: a basic model with a built-in stereo pair of microphones is more than sufficient. You do not need external microphones.
• Positioning: place the device on a table between you both, slightly closer to your relative than to you, ideally 30 to 60 centimetres from their mouth.

Whatever you use, record to the highest quality setting available and in an uncompressed or lightly compressed format. Storage is cheap; a lost syllable is not.

Test before the interview, every single time

This is the step people skip, and it is the step that costs them the interview. Run a full test in the room you are going to use, with the same equipment, shortly before you begin.

• Record thirty seconds of your own voice, speaking in a normal conversational tone.
• Play it back through headphones, not just the tiny speaker, so you can hear hums and hisses.
• Check the file has actually saved, and note the file name so you can find it later.
• Confirm how much recording time the battery and memory will give you — then assume you will need twice as much.
• Switch off notifications, alarms and landline ringers. Nothing ruins a memory quite like a chirrup midway through it.

Set the levels so that normal speech sits comfortably without spiking. Most simple setups do this automatically, but it is worth saying a few loud test sentences to be sure.

Make the room work for you

You do not need a studio. You need a room without a washing machine finishing its cycle, a fridge humming, or a television murmuring next door. Soft furnishings, curtains and carpets absorb echo; kitchens and conservatories bounce sound around and make voices sound distant and hollow. Sit the two of you around a corner of a table rather than face to face across a large one, which keeps you close to the microphone without crowding.

Turn off anything that makes a noise during the recording, and put pets somewhere else. Be honest about interruptions: if you know the phone will ring or a carer is due, plan around it or embrace it and pause the recording.

Back it up before you do anything else

The single moment your recording is most at risk is the hour after you make it. Do not tidy up, do not edit, do not start writing notes — copy the file first.

• Transfer it to a computer as soon as you can, and give it a name you will understand in ten years: 1962-Whitby-holiday-Aunt-Margaret rather than rec0043.
• Keep two further copies: one on an external hard drive, one in cloud storage or on a memory stick held somewhere else. Three copies in three places is the practical standard.
• Never leave the only version on the device you recorded it with. Phones get lost, cards corrupt, batteries die at the wrong moment.
• Write a short note alongside each file: who is speaking, who is asking the questions, the date and the place.

If a recording matters to you, make a second backup a month later. It sounds excessive until the day it isn't.

Keep the conversation going

Once you are rolling, your job is mostly to listen. Ask open questions — "What was the house like when you were small?" — and then let silences sit. People often fill a pause with the very detail you were hoping for. Follow tangents rather than steering back to your list. And when the stories slow, ask the small practical questions that bring a period to life: what things cost, what the kitchen smelled of, what the neighbours' names were, what a school day looked like from beginning to end.

Afterwards, thank them, tell them when you will send a copy, and do send it. Twenty minutes of conversation, properly tested and safely backed up, will outlast almost everything else you own.