Guide · The Family Legacy Checklist
The whole work, on one page.
Legacy work fails from bigness — "someday we should record Grandma" is a wish, not a plan. This checklist breaks the entire work into four seasons of small, finishable acts. Print it, put it on the refrigerator, and let the boxes do what wishes cannot.
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Tap any line to mark it done — your progress is kept on this device, and nowhere else.
This weekend — begin
- Write down every elder in the family, oldest first. Circle the one whose stories the family knows least.
- Call the circled name. Ask for a sitting: "I want my children to know your story. Will you sit with me on Sunday?"
- Read the interview guide and choose your first ten questions.
- Test-record one minute of your own voice on your phone and play it back with headphones.
- Move the family photo box out of the attic, basement, or garage — today.
This month — gather
- Hold the first sitting. Record it. (The recording guide: quiet room, airplane mode, arm's length.)
- Same day: rename the file — name, date, subject — and copy it to a second place.
- Hold a second sitting, with the same elder or the next on the list.
- Pull the fifty photos that matter most and scan them (the photo guide).
- Write names, places, and dates for every scanned face — pencil on the backs, facts in the filenames.
- Send recordings and scans to at least one relative in a different house.
This season — shape
- Ask each elder the mystery questions: unknown faces in photos, the old family names, where the people came from.
- Empty the drawers: Bibles, obituaries, funeral programs, letters, military papers — photograph them all.
- Start the family map: names, places, and dates, one generation at a time (the first-steps guide).
- Write one tribute — for a living elder — and read it to them (the tribute guide).
- Reach 3-2-1: three copies of everything digital, two kinds of storage, one copy outside the house.
Always — keep the fire
- Every birthday and holiday: one new story, recorded. Five minutes counts.
- Every new baby: record the elders saying the child's name and their blessing.
- Every year: check that the backups still open, and add the year's photos to the archive.
- Tell one younger person where everything is kept — an archive with one keeper is one illness from silence.
The companion to this page
A place to keep what the checklist gathers.
As the recordings, scans, and stories accumulate, the free Steward's Journal at Honored Ancestors gives them one home the whole family can inherit — and, when you are ready, a way to seal what must not be lost into the permanent archive.
Begin your Living Legacy — free
Free to begin. The archive is kept at honoredancestors.net.
The Archive's letters
This checklist is free to print — no email asked. If you would like the Archive's occasional letters on keeping family memory, you are welcome to leave yours.