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Guide · Recording Family Stories

Any phone in the house is enough.

Families wait for the "right equipment" while the voices they love grow older. The truth: the phone in your pocket records better sound than the machines that captured the century's great speeches. What makes a recording precious is not the gear — it is that you pressed record. Here is how to do it well.

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Before you press record

• Charge everything and clear space. A full battery and a few free gigabytes. Nothing wounds like a phone dying mid-story.
• Choose the quiet room. Soft surfaces — a bedroom, a carpeted den — beat kitchens and tiled rooms, which echo. Turn off fans, televisions, and the air conditioner for the hour. Their hum is invisible in the moment and unbearable on the recording.
• Put the phone in airplane mode. One call ends the spell — and the take.
• Use what the phone already has. Voice Memos on an iPhone, Voice Recorder or Sound Recorder on Android, the camera app for video. No new apps needed.

For voice: the arm's-length rule

Set the phone on a folded towel (it swallows table vibrations) about an arm's length from the speaker, microphone end toward them. Closer than that, breaths pop; farther, the room swallows the voice. Do a ten-second test — "say what you had for breakfast" — and listen with headphones. If you can hear the words clearly with no hum underneath, you are ready.

For video: light, level, landscape

• Light faces them, never behind them. Seat your elder facing a window; a face lit by daylight needs nothing else. A window at their back turns them into a silhouette.
• Camera at eye level. Prop the phone on a stack of books rather than holding it — hands shake, books don't. Looking slightly up at a person reads as honor; looking down does not.
• Turn the phone sideways. Landscape frames a life; portrait frames a corridor.
• Frame chest-up and leave a little room above the head. Close enough to see their eyes; wide enough to catch their hands, because hands talk too.

When the recording starts

Open every session the same way, spoken aloud: "Today is Sunday, July 6th, 2026. I'm sitting with my grandmother, Rosa Mae Jackson, in her home in Baltimore." Sixty years from now, that one sentence will be worth more than the fanciest camera. Then ask your first question and become an audience of one: nod instead of "mm-hmm" (the recording catches every one), let silences stretch, and never stop the recorder during a pause — the sigh before an answer is often the answer. For what to ask, the Archive's 100 questions are ready.

Recording elders on their own terms

If your elder freezes before a camera, drop to voice only — a relaxed voice outlives a stiff face. If they use an older phone with no room and no apps, call them from your phone, put yours on speaker, and record with a second device. And if distance separates you, record the phone call the honorable way: tell them, ask them, and speak the date aloud together. Consent is not a legal step; it is part of the honoring.

After: the same-day rule

1. Rename the file before you sleep. rosa-mae-jackson-2026-07-06-childhood.m4a beats New Recording 47. Name, date, subject.
2. Make a second copy immediately — email it to yourself, upload to any cloud drive, or copy to a computer. One copy is a hope, not a plan.
3. Send it to one other family member. A story held in two houses is already an archive.
4. Write three lines — who spoke, what was covered, the moment that stopped your breath. That note is the index your grandchildren will thank you for.