Recording Family Stories: 8 Must-Have Features & 1 Essential App
Record family stories before it’s too late—according to research, 80% of family knowledge is lost within just three generations if not preserved…
My own realisation came in 2019 when both my parents faced unexpected and serious health challenges—it dawned on me that so much of our family’s history and knowledge rests solely with them. Valuable stories about their lives, their parents’ lives, our extended family, and even my own childhood years were at risk. Without them, countless stories that strengthen our family identity and connect us to our past would be lost forever. Their health scare became my urgent call to action. I knew I had to record our family’s stories now, because tomorrow offers no guarantees.
So what’s the best way to record family stories, and where exactly should we save them for future generations? That’s where this guide can help.
Jump to section:
- Why Recording Family Stories Matters
- 8 Must-Have Features For Recording Family Stories
- The Solution: How Simirity Brings Everything Together
- Bonus Tips for Exploring Your Family’s Past
Why Recording Family Stories Matters
There are so many benefits to sharing family stories, including:
- Uncovering your roots: Helps you discover your family heritage and create deeper connections with your cultural background.
- Preserving precious memories: Creates a lasting legacy for future generations, giving them a stronger sense of resilience and belonging.
- Capturing childhood moments: Documents your children’s lives as they grow, allowing everyone to relive those irreplaceable early days.
- Strengthening family bonds: Establishes a shared family venture that helps you connect and understand each other on a deeper level.
- Inspiring meaningful conversations: Encourages interesting and diverse family discussions about topics rarely explored in daily life.
- Contextualising media: Saves your photos and videos with meaningful stories, so future generations can make sense of them.
Clearly, recording family stories isn’t just about capturing pleasant memories—they’re the threads that weave together your family’s sense of identity.
With everyone living increasingly busy lives, often separated from extended family, there’s simply no opportunity to share these stories in person. Traditional, in-person storytelling has been replaced with quick messages, shared photos and emojis. While these modern communications are certainly convenient, so much depth and meaning is lost when we don’t take the time to record family stories properly.
8 Must-Have Features For Recording Family Stories
Let’s face it, recording family stories is not something that gets completed overnight. For best and most rewarding results, you need everything working for you:
- Motivated family members who are ready to contribute.
- Clear ideas for what to write about.
- Supportive technology that allows you to capture your stories in all their richness.
When my family started out on this venture after my parents’ health scare, we were filled with motivation, but struggled to find a way to start.
- We couldn’t get excited about creating a shared document—that felt too much like work rather than a meaningful family experience!
- We considered building extensive photo albums, but quickly realised they only tell a small part of our life stories.
- There were options to create printed books for specific family members, but we wanted to preserve diverse stories from across our entire family, not just from certain individuals.
Over time, we realised that successfully recording family stories requires more than just a simple tool. It needed a comprehensive approach that incorporates the following 8 must-have features.
Thankfully, there is one app that incorporates all these critical elements, which I’ll share with you shortly.
Feature 1: Make it a meaningful family experience
Enjoy spending quality time with your family, discussing topics that go beyond the usual small talk. This should be an enriching family experience, not just another item on your to-do list.
Recording family stories is as much about the journey as it is about reaching the destination. Everyone, from grandparents to their youngest grandkids, should feel a part of it.
Feature 2: Treat it as an ongoing family venture
Family storytelling never truly ends—each passing day creates new stories worth recording. Some services treat family storytelling as a short-lived project with a definite conclusion, but this approach misses the point entirely.
Instead of viewing it as a one-time project, record family stories as an ongoing, evolving venture. While there may be many historical stories you want to prioritise capturing before it’s too late, your family continues creating new memories worth preserving every single day—make recording family stories a habit that everyone genuinely enjoys participating in.
Feature 3: Find ways to identify great stories
If you simply create a shared document to record family stories, you’ll be missing one vital ingredient—guidance and inspiration for writing truly engaging stories.
A great family story recording service should inspire you with hundreds of intriguing story prompts and ideas. There are so many fascinating aspects of life to explore—the only challenge should be deciding between the wonderful options.
Feature 4: Flexible storytelling methods
Many story-capturing services unnecessarily limit how you communicate your family’s unique stories. Here are some common approaches with limitations:
- Audio only—stories recorded over the phone or online and preserved solely in audio format.
- Photos only—vast collections of images share only the visual aspects of your story, while countless other elements remain missing.
- Printed stories—typically combining written words with photos, but excluding important digital elements like videos and voice recordings.
Why record family stories in just one dimension when you can preserve those special times in all their glory by thoughtfully combining written words with photos, videos, voice recordings, interactive maps and more?
Feature 5: Keep it private and advert-free
For our family, this was a must. We even stopped sharing family photos on mainstream social media due to growing concerns about our privacy and data security. And most of our friends families were doing the same.
Family stories are intimate and deeply personal. Who wants to upload such stories to a platform that monetises your data and bombards you with adverts?
Feature 6: Reminds you about old stories
Have you ever created a beautiful photo book, only to realise that after the initial delight, it’s mainly forgotten, gathering dust on the bookshelf?
If your family is investing the effort to record meaningful stories, shouldn’t it be a basic requirement that these stories become naturally woven into your daily life? This ensures you can enjoy those stories not just once, but year after year, deepening your connection each time.
Some services like Google Photos do a great job of reminding their users of photos taken in previous years—why can’t we have the same valuable functionality for family stories? Imagine delightful reminders like:
- Today, 1 year ago, you were doing this…
- Today, 10 years ago, your child was doing this…
- Today, 50 years ago, your mother was going this…
- Today, 100 years ago, your grandfather was going this…
After all, the whole point of recording family stories is to enjoy them and feel genuinely connected to your past—not forget about them!
Feature 7: Flexible story access for all your family
Imagine how sad it would be to have a priceless collection of family stories that’s only available to a limited few family members.
For printed books, that’s often the unfortunate outcome. Thankfully, digital solutions enable families to create, share and preserve stories online, giving everyone convenient access, no matter where in the world they live.
Some flexibility with who sees certain stories may be necessary from time to time:
- Sensitive stories about life challenges might not be appropriate for younger family members.
- Some subjects may only seem appropriate to share with your immediate family or partner.
- Certain private topics you might want to capture for yourself only.
What’s clear is that platforms preserving family stories should give users full control over who can access their stories—from all family to the creator only.
Feature 8: Ensure it’s future-proof
Some families share stories using social media and messenger apps. While entertaining in the moment, how will you quickly access those scattered memories years from now? How will your children or future generations possibly find them?
Realistically, stories shared across social media and messaging apps are highly likely to get lost over time, buried under mountains of content or lost to platform changes.
When you record family stories, make absolutely sure there’s a clear way to give new family members and future generations secure access to your stories. Your stories represent a living family legacy—there must be a reliable way to pass them on.
Here is a summary of those 8 must-have features.
The Solution: How Simirity Brings Everything Together
After much searching, our family couldn’t find any existing service that provided all these must-have features, so we built Simirity. It’s a family-centric app, purpose-made for recording family stories in a meaningful way and strengthening family bonds throughout the process.
Simirity is your family’s digital scrapbook of memories.
Beyond photos, videos and voice notes, Simirity app uses real-life stories from your family’s past and present to enrich family relationships while storing cherished memories for tomorrow.
Your stories blossom into rewarding conversations that take your family beyond everyday small talk—creating moments of genuine connection that you’ll treasure forever.
If you found our 8 must-have features meaningful, Simirity is going to be a great option for you—no other service provides this combination of family storytelling features.
Join for free today and start recording family stories before more irreplaceable memories slip away.
Bonus Tips for Exploring Your Family’s Past
Here are a few additional resources to help you explore your family’s past:
- Explore this list of ideas for stories.
- Download over 350 questions to ask your parents about their lives.
- Track down your ancestors and perhaps even discover living relatives using family genealogy sites and family DNA tests.
- Explore alternative methods to preserve your family history.
