How to actually do this

Three things decide whether a family archive survives

Almost none of it is the software, which is why these guides spend very little time on buttons.

The first is the size of the unit. A family that records twenty seconds most weeks accumulates roughly an hour of irreplaceable voice a year from a standing start. A family that plans a comprehensive interview accumulates nothing, because the afternoon never arrives. Every guide here assumes the small version.

The second is whether a second person ever contributes. One contributor is a hobby and it burns out — usually a mother or a grandmother carrying it alone. Two is a system. The reliable way to get the second is to ask one specific question only that person can answer, rather than inviting them to a project.

The third is whether anything comes back. An archive that only absorbs effort is abandoned at around week three. Something arriving — a montage, a recap, a game made of your own photographs — is what makes the next addition happen.

The one task with an actual deadline

Everything in a family archive is cumulative except one thing: the photographs whose subjects can only be identified by someone who is getting older.

Once the last person who can name the people in a picture is gone, that image is permanently unreadable, and the loss is silent — nobody is present at the moment it becomes irreversible. It is the largest category of family history that is lost outright rather than merely disorganised.

If you read one guide first, read what to record first, and then go and sit with the oldest person you have and twenty photographs.