Recorded in her own voice, and kept.
Every family has a story that only one person tells properly. The pauses are part of it. The laugh in the middle is part of it. Written down, it is a different story.
A transcript is not a voice. It is a summary of one.
Names are pronounced a particular way. A phrase belongs to one person and everyone knows it. A story has a rhythm that the teller has had forty years to get right. None of that survives being typed out, and all of it is the reason anyone wants the recording in the first place.
So Voices keeps the recording as the record, not a note about it, not a tidied version of it.
Start with the question nobody has asked her.
The hardest part is not the recording. It is knowing what to ask before there is no one left to ask.
- Whose house did everyone gather at, and why that one?
- Where does our clan name come from, as you were told it?
- Who am I named after, and what were they like?
- What happened the year everybody still talks about?
- What did your mother say that you still repeat?
Five minutes is a recording. Nobody needs an hour.
Record, name, keep.
-
Record it where it happens
At the table, in the car, on a call. The room it was recorded in is part of what you are keeping.
-
Say who is speaking
From the family's own record, so a voice is attached to a person and not to a filename.
-
Decide who can hear it
The whole family, or the people it is about. Changeable afterwards.