Memories Matter
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Hey, memories! Come out of the closet, will you?
Your memories live in your head and heart, but family photos, heirlooms & mementos sure do call those memories forth—how to use them towards a life story book.
Sorting through your family archive for items for your life story book should be more strategic than organizing everything for posterity.
One of the first steps in any life story project is to begin to gather all the stuff in your family archive.
By that I mean photos, journals, letters, and mementos—the stuff of your life.
Finding and inventorying these items will help you in two ways:
as a tool for helping you prioritize and determine what is worth saving and what can be tossed—and how to plan for tackling the archive as a (separate) organization and preservation project.
as a resource for finding those items that will help tell your stories visually for your life story book project.
That second one is what we are focused on here!
How to organize your family archive as a resource for your life story book
Ready to get started? Using this free chart or a digital spreadsheet, make a list of everywhere your items live.
Remember: This is a guide to preparing your archive specifically as a resource for your life story book! That means yes, you should be focused on items that you want to include visually in your book, but also items that simply spark memories.
What is included in your family archive?
A Family Archive Checklist
physical family photos in boxes, albums, and frames
digital family photos on phones, computers, old disks, social media accounts, and external hard drives
family papers, including genealogy documentation, birth and death certificates, etc.
letters, journals, and diaries
mementos such as ticket stubs, postcards, report cards, scrapbook ephemera
physical family heirlooms such as inherited china, heritage furniture, passed-down jewelry
Finding inspiration and raw material
Back to using your archive as a reference for your life story book: Consider all of the items in your family archive to be raw materials that you can both find inspiration in and use to help tell your stories. A few ways to mine your family archive for this project:
Resources for remembering
Use specific family photos to jog your memories about your childhood.
Use letters and journals to help you recall details and emotions of recorded experiences.
Pull out tickets stubs and other mementos that hold the most meaning and make you feel something strong—they’ll likely be fodder for compelling stories if they hold that much sway.
Consider your genealogical files to be fact-checking resources for names, dates, and relationships that may be fuzzy in your memory.
Materials to reproduce in your book
Photograph family heirlooms so they can be accompanied by their stories in your book, so years from now they won’t be some dusty relics but heirlooms with a storied pedigree.
Select key old photos to digitize for inclusion in your book: Pictures help bring your words to life, but they must be chosen wisely.
Perhaps your handwritten journals evoke your teen years or capture a particularly emotional period in your life: Consider reproducing a key page or paragraphs throughout your book if you think they will add texture and a visual touchstone.
At this point, you should be most concerned with identifying and locating those items that you feel will be most useful to you in your life story project. Make a separate list, and pull out those materials to have on hand. Consider this a separate collection specifically gathered to help you tell your life story.
“When you have finished your appraisal, you’ll be left with a collection of the best and most significant artifacts,” archivist Margot Note writes. “Because you’ll be focusing on the collections that have the most value, you’ll be able to concentrate your efforts on what is most meaningful to you.” Indeed.
Keeping your curated archive on hand
Now that you have a tighter collection of photos, journals, and mementos set aside specifically for your life story project, keep them on hand—as well as the bulk of your family archive that you designated in the beginning.
Just because you set aside a photo initially doesn’t mean it will be the best for spurring memories later on; you may end up going back to those boxes to find another shot, or flipping through a different journal to discover a later recollection.
Be gentle with yourself. There’s no “getting it right”—this is a journey of discovery! Try to be strategic and deliberate while sorting your family archive, and understand that it’s all too easy to get lost in memories and nostalgia while trying to organize. When you realize that’s happening, steer yourself back to the task at hand, and remember: All of this is to provide you with the opportunity to reflect purposefully later on.
Printable Inventory Form
Download our free printable to help you keep track of all your life story project’s visual assets, from family photos to ticket stubs and journals—it’s easy-peasy.
Related reading
I will link to parts two and three in this series when they are posted:
You might also be interested in:
Tackling your whole archive?
If you would like to tackle getting your archive under control, I highly recommend purchasing archivist Margot Note’s book Creating Family Archives: A Step-by-Step Guide to Saving Your Memories for Future Generations. She’ll walk you through how to handle your materials, the best supplies, to buy, and ways to display and share your personal archives. Keep in mind: This is usually a big (and sprawling) project that takes some time to complete, but it is well worth your effort (especially if you have children; as I have written about before, leaving them a mess of family mementos is usually more of a burden than a welcome gift).
6 tips for choosing the best family photos to use as writing prompts
Family photos can be useful tools to jog memories and call forth stories. We share how to determine which images will elicit the best family stories.
There are no rules for how to choose a photo that will be effective as a biographical writing prompt, but we can offer a few guidelines for the types of images that often elicit storytelling that is deeper and more meaningful than a mere identifying caption.
That’s the goal, after all: To use a photo as a starting point for your storytelling—as a jumping off point for memories, a touchstone for emotions, a lead-in to a narrative from your life.
So get out your old family photo albums or that dusty box of print photographs from the basement! Then…
Step One: Choose 10-20 pictures to start with.
Begin randomly looking at photos.
Rather than focusing on those that are frame-worthy, look for photos that elicit a strong feeling from the viewer (you, or the family member from whom you would like to capture stories).
Set aside 10-20 images that stopped you in your tracks in number two (even if you stopped to wonder about the image as opposed to reliving memories as a result of looking at it; sometimes it’s the mysteries behind a photo that draw forth particularly revelatory stories).
Now it’s time to choose a photo with which to begin your reminiscing. Whether you are using the photo as a writing prompt or as a vehicle to jump-start conversation in a personal history interview, the following suggestions will be helpful in selecting images that lead to substantial storytelling.
“Photos reveal themselves in layers,” Maureen Taylor (aka ‘The Photo Detective’) writes on her blog. “You study the clues and talk to family but every time you look at it or show it off to family you might learn something new. One thing leads to another.”
Step Two: Determine if the photo is story-worthy,
Ask yourself if the photo you are holding does any of the following six things—and if the answer to one or more of them is yes, then you’ve got yourself a winner. Set it aside and make sure it’s on hand the next time you want to delve into some family history writing!
The photo invokes an emotional response.
Do you feel a rush of excitement or a flush of scarlet creep up your face when you first spy the picture? It may make you feel anguish or sorrow, pride or exasperation, abundant joy or abiding love—the key is, it makes you feel.
If a family photo has such a visceral effect on you, this will be most fruitful for writing its story.
“Photographs are about one specific second, but they can also be about the future,” Beth Kephart writes in The Quest for Truth. “Photographs can operate as metaphor and counterweight, as tease and opposition, as the other half of a parenthesis.”
That photo that moves you is a doorway to your past that is clearly connected to your present in some way. Explore why you feel the way you do, and how this feeling fits into your life then and now. Provide context for your feelings; set the scene.
The picture tells a visual story.
Sometimes a picture itself already reveals a story: If the who, what, where, when, and why (or most of those) are apparent just from looking at the photo, then it’s likely a good candidate for embellishing upon. Of course, it’s ideal to choose images whose stories matter to you in some way.
The snapshot of this woman breastfeeding certainly tells a story about who she was as a mother—and if the mores of the time period and the town are known, and her character as well, then the storyteller can dive deep. A grown child looking at this image might use it as a jumping-off point for talking about their relationship over the years; or perhaps how their mom was part of a strong line of women before her; maybe she was only able to have one child, or 10, or only girls…
A photo is a moment in time, but on the periphery are details that help make up its narrative. What photo would have been shot just before this one? Just after? What’s in the frame? What (and notably who) is not in the frame? By starting with a picture whose story seems readily available, we can develop depth by asking such probing questions and tapping our memories for more.
Details draw your attention.
Your facial expression at the time the picture was snapped. The pattern of your grandmother’s well-worn house dress. A missing button on your dad’s shirt, or the papers falling from his briefcase. The water stain on the bedroom wallpaper. If some detail in a photo draws your eye again and again, there is more to be probed.
What does the detail begin to tell you? What beyond the frame of the photo—on that day, or a decade before or after the photo was taken—makes you focus on it? By taking the time to meditate upon all that the detail calls forth in your mind, you will reveal a greater meaning to this photo than could ever be revealed upon initial inspection.
The photo portrays part of the subject’s everyday world.
My favorite type of modern family pictures could be described as documentary family photography: people in their natural environment, doing what they do every day. (Check out talented photographer Jen Grima’s work for inspiration.) I love capturing our routine family narrative this way because the resulting photos are so evocative of time and place, and they set us in scenes that are real and personal, uniquely ours.
Many old family photos do so less consciously, perhaps, but the impact is the same. We are drawn to such pictures because they reveal what our or our ancestor’s life was like back then. So if a snapshot of your aunt holding you while she’s hanging the laundry crosses your path, use it to tell a story. If you find a picture of grandpa reading in his favorite recliner, dad trimming the hedges at your childhood home, or your baby crawling amidst the messy remnants of Christmas wrapping paper, use them all—find their stories.
The image intrigues you.
Is it a curious shot? Out of the ordinary for your family or for the time period? Is someone missing who you would have expected to be present in that scene?
If it makes you wonder, then it very well may lead to a worthwhile story. Perhaps you end up asking for relatives’ input to get to the bottom of your intrigue, or maybe in lieu of concrete answers you surmise the story behind the old photo, thereby revealing a narrative of your own in relation to the photo. Chances are, whatever your approach the resulting observations will be as alluring to the next person as the original photograph was to you.
The physical print tells its own story.
My grandmother had a tendency to hold a grudge, so it was not too surprising to find among her things photos that had an individual literally cut out of the scene (or crossed out with ballpoint pen). Now there’s a story to be revealed! The same could be said for pictures that have been torn, damaged by flood or fire, or found tucked away in a book.
Sometimes getting to the story behind the photo is as fun—and constructive—as getting to the story that resides within it.
Step 3: Start sharing your stories.
Read more about how to use old family photos as biographical writing prompts—we’re talking nitty-gritty advice, from where to begin after looking at the photo to how to capture your memories.
Download the advice in a handy printer-friendly booklet here, entitled “How to Use Photographs as Prompts for Writing Life Stories.”
Explore more intense self-reflective writing prompts in Beth Kephart’s memoir writing workbook.
Once you’ve written your first life story vignette, consider doing something special with it—we’ve got five easy ideas.
Sharing is good
Print and share your family photos with loved ones. Besides generating conversation, you will spark joy, find genealogy clues, and discover even more treasures.
“Sharing is good.“ This childhood lesson is applicable in all areas of life, of course, but today I want to encourage sharing of your family photos.
It’s been written about ad nauseum in recent years: Our digital photo scrolls are out of control…we need to stop taking so many pictures and live in the moment…we never print our pictures anymore.
While I agree wholeheartedly with each of these lamentable statements, it’s the lack of printed photos that troubles me most—specifically, the sense of connection and excitement that gets lost when we neglect to print our photos, and share them in person.
In person, I say.
It’s temporarily gratifying to get lots of likes on an Instagram share, to see heart emojis galore on your Facebook post. But the joy that results from sharing a memory in person—well, that simply can’t compare.
Why You Should Share Your Photos
A family photo holds a story. It is a font of memories, frozen in one still frame.
Amazingly enough, the story shifts with each participant: Your mom, maybe, who took the photo, remembers things just a bit differently than you do; and your sister, a few years older, recalls things from an entirely different perspective. What about your baby brother, who only saw this photo—and heard its associated stories—years later?
Like all stories derived from memories, truth is subjective. And while a photo seems to capture a scene exactly as it happened, well, that’s subjective, too. Can you say “conversation starter”?!
So besides sparking conversation, why should you share your photos—and your photo memories—with loved ones? Here are three compelling reasons:
1 - You share, they share.
It’s contagious. You show someone an old photo from your childhood, and they reciprocate with a shot they had in a drawer somewhere. You pull out your dad’s old scrapbook filled with family photos from his youth to spark conversation with your parents, and they reveal they have two more stored in the basement.
Sharing what you have encourages family members to share some of their own family treasures, too—and what could be better than that?
2 - You might learn something.
From a name scribbled on the back of an old photographic print or a comment made in passing by a family member to whom you are showing your photos, you just may discover something new: details or backstory that enrich your own experience of the picture; or perhaps a surname or location that helps with a genealogical search.
Just because your family elders have not shared such info before doesn’t mean they don’t know it—too often I hear, “Well, no one ever asked me.” So show…and ask!
3 - You’ll feel darn good.
Sharing the joy and love associated with your favorite family photos makes that joy grow. You get that altruistic benefit that comes from sharing of yourself—witnessing another’s enjoyment, and feeling your own heart swell.
Do something special with one story
No one will tell your life stories but you. Start with one, & go beyond sharing it: Do something with it! 5 ideas for preserving one chapter of your life story.
No one will tell your life stories but you. Start with one—and go beyond sharing it: Do something with it! We've come up with 5 unique—and easy!—ideas for preserving one chapter of your life story.
Who knows, one chapter might turn into two...
If you don't tell your life stories, who will?
Taking the first step on the road to preserving your memories
I previously posed the question, “Who will tell your life story?” How would you answer that question? If your answer wasn’t a resounding “me!” then, well, you answered wrong.
No one will tell your stories but you. And you must: Tell them, and preserve them.
In that post I recommend an easy 3-step plan for how to take the first steps on the road to preserving your stories. Step No. 2 involves sharing one story—whether around the dinner table with your family or over the phone with your grandkids, whether in writing or out loud, just tell one story. It might be one so often recounted it’s like an old friend, or it might be a distant memory you haven’t pulled out in decades.
Here’s the rub, though: Once you fulfill step No. 2, I implore you to move on to step No. 3: Do something with it.
5 ideas for what to do with your little life story
Remember, this isn’t your whole life story. There’s no need to publish it to Amazon or strive to write a bestselling memoir. You focused on telling one engaging story and telling it well. Now let’s do something to ensure your story lives on.
For what good is a story if you don’t breathe life into it, if it isn’t shared?
Here are a few ideas for things to do with your little life story. These are just the tip of the iceberg, and we’d love to hear other creative ways you have found for keeping your memories alive; please share in the comments below!
1. Eat, drink, and be merry.
What is it about finger foods and wine and an informal gathering of loved ones that spark storytelling? It’s as good as being around a proverbial campfire! Invite an interesting mix of people to a dinner party (think a mix of ages, a mix of relatives and close friends, and a mix of those who may be familiar with your story and those who are not).
Get creative with the place settings—scan some old family photos related to your story for name cards, for example—or get really down and dirty and place cushions on the floor for a good old-fashioned buffet of food and stories.
The important thing is this: Don’t be shy about revealing your goal of story sharing. If being the center of attention makes you nervous, ask a loved one to help set the stage, or ask a few guests to come prepared to share their own stories, too.
2. Embrace technology.
Maybe it’s as simple as sending an email to your family: Type your story into the body of an email, and hit “send.”
Or: Begin a story circle with one post on Facebook. If you’ve got a vibrant community of friends on the social media site, share your whole story there (trust us, if it’s personal and from the heart, they WILL read the whole post!) and—most importantly—ask your friends to share related stories in the comments. When people begin sharing (about a loved one who passed away, for instance, or about an old #ThrowbackThursday photo) and then commenting on one another’s comments, that’s social media at its absolute best, in my opinion.
3. Start a new tradition.
Don’t stop at one story. Weave story sharing into the fabric of your life. Make it a habit. If you invite others to participate (whether as a regular audience to your stories or as memory keepers themselves), then that habit becomes a meaningful new tradition.
The more you can truly integrate your specific means of story preservation into your life, the deeper connections among family you will make, the more value you will derive from the process, and the more you will cement your legacy for the next generation.
4. Grab a pen.
When’s the last time you wrote more than your signature in longhand? If your story is short enough, pick up a pen and a beautiful piece of paper and transcribe your words in your own handwriting.
If it is one page, consider framing and hanging it. If it revolves around a food memory, why not have it memorialized on a lovely food-safe platter? If you’ve really got the writing bug, write it out in letter form, once for each of your children or grandchildren, and mail it to them.
5. Go pro.
If you would like to preserve your words and images together in an heirloom book or video, consider hiring a professional personal historian. We will
guide the storytelling process
elicit details & emotion
add context
to present your memories in a most engaging way.
Here at Modern Heirloom Books, we specialize in bespoke coffee table books that tell your stories. Find out more.
If you prefer to preserve your story in a medium other than a book, I may be able to recommend videographers or audio specialists near you. Give us a call—we’re here to help you tell your stories beautifully!
One chapter at a time
You are living your story. Don’t let your memories fade, and don’t wait until it’s too late to begin recording them. Start with one story that you love to tell—you won’t regret it, and your family will thank you a million times over!
Related reading:
#familyhistorymonth #memoriesmatter #legacy #storytelling #loveandloss #familyhistory
How to use photographs as prompts for writing life stories
Use these tips to tell the stories behind your family photos and leave a visual AND narrative history to your children—a gift from the past to the future.
“Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really wants to see.” —Paul Strand
If writing a life story book seems overwhelming, write shorter stories from your life using some favorite family photos to jog your memory.
My generation knows the pleasure, both tactile and emotional, of exploring a box of dusty old photographs: the sense of discovery, of time travel, the good fortune of glimpsing our parents as carefree teenagers, of seeing ourselves as Garanimals-clad kids.
But this is becoming a thing of the past. Do you even have a box of photos in your home?
It saddens me to think of our children inheriting a box of old devices (your iphone will be extinct one day, you know!) and wondering how they can access the digital trove of photos they know must be stored within. And they likely won’t be able to retrieve those images, as the technology will have changed by then.
Just as I wish my mother and grandmother had jotted names and dates on the back of their old photos, our kids will one day be wishing we left some clues about our own pictures (metadata, anyone?).
I urge you to go a few steps further, to not only record the details of important photographs, but to elucidate the stories associated with them. To leave a visual AND narrative history to your children, a gift from the past for the future.
How to Shape Your (Small) Life Stories
I’ve written about this before, but it’s worth reiterating: Shorter is often better, especially when it comes to autobiographical writing. That’s why using photos as jumping-off points for your stories can be such an effective method.
Don’t worry about length when you sit down to write. Just choose a photo, and begin sharing. A few initial ideas:
1 - Talk, don’t write.
Pick up a digital recorder (or use the function on your smart phone) and talk into it. Often spoken language is more direct. You won’t get hung up on sentence structure or finding the perfect words. Rather, your language will flow and have a natural rhythm. Your words will be honest and forthright. You can transcribe your recording later.
2 - Find a partner.
Having someone to listen to your story can be a powerful aid. Even if that person doesn’t engage you or ask questions, the very act of listening—an occasional nod, an understanding expression—let’s the speaker know that what they are saying matters. The more you converse with someone about your life stories, the easier it becomes to share them, shape them, and delve even deeper.
3 - Be specific.
Small details. Moments. A focus on life as it is truly lived. Did your mother enjoy a cup of room-temperature tea every night before bed? What did the hand-me-down pajamas you’re wearing in the Christmas-morning picture feel like? It wasn’t just a red car, it was a 1955 crimson Cadillac convertible that your dad referred to as “My Dorado.” This is not to say get lost in the details: Do not go overboard describing every object and movement in your story with multiple modifiers. This is to say that the specificity of the right details brings an era or a person to life in a most vibrant and revealing way. Choose wisely.
4 - Interview you.
If you hadn’t taken the picture, what would you want to know? Make believe you’re interviewing yourself. This is a helpful exercise in making sure the most essential (often obvious to you but not others) elements do not get left out of your story. And then, like HONY’s Stanton, edit, edit, edit: whittle your interview down to the bone, keeping in those details that surprise, delight, enlighten. I suggest waiting at least a day, longer if you have the luxury of time, to do the editing; it’s amazing how such distance enables us to better self-edit.
Let’s get started: Choose a picture, and use it as a prompt to write a life story vignette
Step 1: Look at your chosen photo.
Study it; ignore it. Eat some lunch and let the memories the picture elicits percolate. Now sit down at your computer to free write: Don’t worry about story structure or creating something for an audience, just write from your heart. If you are more comfortable with pen and paper, you might forego sentences altogether and jot down phrases, recollections, adjectives. The key to both approaches, whether stream-of-consciousness writing or brainstorming, is to go fast and to not worry about anything. Just do it.
thumbs up?
You may find that this one photo has stirred a wealth of memories for you to mine. Perhaps it recalls one vibrant scene from your childhood. Consider yourself lucky if either of these is the case! You’ve got the makings of a life story vignette at your fingertips.
thumbs down?
If the photo you’ve chosen reveals nothing more than a string of boring observations, don’t fret. First, go through this list to see if you get anywhere:
What is your personal connection to the photo?
What would you caption the photo (include as much basic factual information as possible, answering Who, What, Why, When?)
Write a question the photo brings to mind.
Write a detailed observation about the photo.
Still boring…? Don’t worry, just move on to the helpful exercise below to get the story behind your photo!
Step 2: Go beyond the frame.
Next, try this exercise from author Beth Kephart, an early assignment she would give to her creative nonfiction students at the University of Pennsylvania, as detailed in her book Handling the Truth:
Study the background of any chosen photograph. Not the foreground, the background. What’s in the picture that you didn’t see when you were snapping? What lies beyond the chosen subject—just to the right or the left? … What does the startle of the once-unnoticed detail suggest to you? What would happen if this small thing—and not the obvious thing, the central thing, the thing easily seized and snatched—was the start of your story?
Still nothing of interest?
Step 3: Enlist Help.
If you are convinced there is a worthy story attached to the photo, show it to a sibling or other relative to see what memories they may have. If you have other pictures from the same period, gaze at those for clues. Maybe it means something to you not for the story it tells, but for the one it does not tell: Who is the subject gazing at? What happened right before the camera was snapped? Who was left out of the moment—was it you? Or was the picture in a frame at your grandparents’ home, and your memory of that is what’s important?
If nothing more reveals itself and yet you are still compelled to include the photograph in your life story, ask yourself, why? Draft a caption that at least puts the image in context, reveals a mystery, or taps an emotion. Then leave it at that, and turn to your next photo. It is likely that after taking this approach with more of your family snapshots, this one will eventually find its way into your narrative or, rightfully, be edited out in favor of others that weave a more textured and colorful tapestry.
FREE Printable Guide
Download our FREE GUIDE, “How to Use Photographs as Prompts for Writing Life Stories” and get started asap on your journey of preserving your memories!
Next steps, and advice for non-writers
If all of this appeals to you but you’re not a DIYer, that’s what we are here for.
You may want to begin the journey of remembering and selecting photos on your own, using much of the advice provided on the blog—and then hand it over for refining and shaping; our expert editors and designers will transform your memories into a beautiful heirloom that reveals even more than you had imagined.
If you only get as far as piling up those boxes, no worries: We’ll walk you through the whole process! Set up a free consultation to learn how we can work together.