The voice is the thing

Ask anyone who has lost a parent what they'd want back, and very few say a photograph. They have photographs. Thousands, probably, more than any previous generation could have imagined.

What they say instead is that they've forgotten how the person sounded.

Memory keeps the face longer than the sound

Faces are reinforced constantly — in albums, on walls, in the folder on your phone. A voice has nowhere to live. Unless it was recorded on purpose, it fades within a few years, and people describe the moment they notice it's gone as its own small loss.

It isn't only the sound. It's the way someone arrived at a point sideways. The phrase they used that nobody else used. The pause before they said something they meant.

Video holds what writing can't

Written memoirs are wonderful and almost nobody finishes one. The blank page asks for a performance — for the story to be shaped and edited and made presentable — and that's a lot to ask of someone who just wants to tell you about their mother.

Talking is easier. People who insist they aren't storytellers turn out to be perfectly good ones the moment there's no page involved.

The unremarkable recording ages well

The recordings families treasure are almost never the composed ones. They're the accidental clips — a birthday, a kitchen, someone talking over someone else, a joke that isn't funny to anyone outside the room.

That's worth knowing before you start, because the instinct is to wait until there's something important enough to record. There rarely is. The importance arrives later, and it attaches itself to whatever happens to have been kept.

Start before it feels necessary

The best time to record someone is while it still feels premature — while they're well, and unhurried, and inclined to argue that nobody would want to listen.

They're wrong about that. And it's much easier to be wrong about it now than to be right about it too late.