How to Record Your Family History

This book is about how to preserve the history of people alive today. It is not designed to help you create a genealogical chart-there are other excellent resources for that. This book is for the person who wants to gather family stories as told by family members who are still living. This book will help you capture on audio or video the actual voices, faces and places of your living relatives. It will help you keep alive the timber of their voice, the smile of their face, the tilt of their head, their gestures, their mode of dress and other things relating to their real life stories, all as told by those who know them best. There is an urgency that accompanies this book: The stories of your relatives who are alive today will be around only as long as they are alive. Before you invest one dollar or one hour in genealogical research, first gather the stories of your living, but aging, relatives. Don't worry about genealogical information now, because the amount of genealogical data will grow exponentially over the ensuing decades. The more that information is digitized, the easier it will be to assemble it. In short, genealogical research can wait. Creating live recordings of the precious memories of living people cannot.