Huminz Guide

How to Record a Relative Telling Their Story

The written version of a life is the part people plan for. The recording is the part they wish they had. A phone on a kitchen table is enough equipment, and the whole difficulty is in four other things: asking properly, keeping the session short, not filling the silences, and labelling the file before you put the phone back in your pocket.

Why the recording outlives the transcript

A grandchild who never met the person will listen to two minutes of their voice far sooner than they will read twenty pages about them. The voice carries what writing flattens: the accent, the hesitation before the honest answer, the laugh in the middle of a sentence, the way they say a place name nobody pronounces that way any more.

It is also the only part of this work that cannot be done later by someone else. A date can be looked up in a register and a photograph can be scanned in thirty years’ time. A voice cannot be reconstructed from anything.

So if you have one afternoon and you are choosing between writing notes and pressing record, press record.

Ask permission properly

Not “do you mind if I record this?” as you reach for the phone — that invites a polite no. Ask in advance, say why, and say where it will end up:

“I’d like to record you talking about the Longsight years, so the grandchildren can hear you tell it rather than read my version. It would be for the family — nothing public. Would that be all right?”

Three things to settle while you are asking, because they are awkward to raise later:

• Who will hear it. Family only, or might it be shared more widely one day?
• What is off the record. Agree that they can say “don’t keep that bit”, and mean it. People tell you more, not less, once they know the brakes work.
• That they can stop. Say plainly that you will turn it off whenever they want.

Leave the phone in view rather than hidden. A visible recorder is forgotten within ten minutes; a concealed one is a betrayal if it is ever discovered.

The setup, in five minutes

• A phone, lying on the table between you, microphone end pointing at them. Two feet away is better than six. Use the built-in voice recorder app — nothing needs buying.
• Sit at an angle, not across the table. Side by side with a corner between you produces a conversation; directly opposite produces an interview.
• Kill the room noise you can control: the television, the radio, the extractor fan, the washing machine finishing its cycle. Hard rooms echo — a cloth on the table and curtains drawn help more than you would think.
• No paper tablecloth, no fidgeting with cups. A phone picks up a teaspoon on a saucer far louder than a soft voice across the table.
• Airplane mode, and charged. An incoming call will stop the recording. Check there is space on the phone: audio runs roughly a megabyte a minute, so an hour is about 60 MB.
• Record fifteen seconds and play it back before you begin properly. This is the one step people skip and the only one that cannot be fixed afterwards.

Running the session

Forty-five minutes, one era. An hour is usually too long, and a session that wanders across sixty years produces anecdotes with no spine to hang them on. Pick childhood, or the first job, or the year they married, and stay there. Three short sessions will always beat one marathon.

Open with something easy and concrete. “Describe the kitchen of the house you grew up in” works almost every time. Save anything heavy for a later session, once the talking has loosened up and they know how this goes.

Ask one question, then stop talking. Your voice on the recording should be a fraction of theirs. If you need questions, the companion guide has a hundred of them, grouped by era: 100 questions to ask your parents.

Don’t correct them. If a date is wrong or the account differs from your own memory, let it stand and note it afterwards. Correcting someone mid-story is the fastest way to make them stop telling it.

Say the date and the subject out loud at the start — “it’s the seventh of October, and Mum is going to talk about Longsight”. Fifty years from now that sentence is the only thing standing between the recording and total ambiguity.

Silence, and going off-topic

Leave the pauses alone. The most useful sentence in a recording usually arrives about four seconds after you thought they had finished, and it arrives only if you do not fill the gap. Count to five before asking the next question. It will feel impolite and it is not.

When they wander off the subject, follow them. The tangent is usually better than the question you had planned — you chose the question, they chose the tangent, and only one of you knows where the good material is. You can always come back.

The ten minutes afterwards that matter most

Do these before you leave the house, or at least the same day. Unlabelled audio on a phone is the modern version of the unnamed photograph in a shoebox.

1. Rename the file with date, person and subject: 2026-10-07-mum-longsight-years.m4a. Never leave it as New Recording 14.
2. Get it off the phone. The phone is the least safe place it will ever live.
3. Write down three things while they are fresh: anything you promised to keep off the record, the names you could not spell, and the questions that opened them up — those are what you will use next time.
4. Note the timestamps of the two or three best moments. Future you will not listen through fifty minutes to find them.

Transcribe, or don’t

A full transcript is a lot of work and it is rarely what makes the story readable — people do not speak in paragraphs, and a verbatim transcript reads worse than either the audio or a written chapter.

What works better: listen back and write the memory as a short chapter in your own hand, then keep the audio alongside it for the parts that only the voice can carry. Quote them directly where the phrasing is theirs and worth preserving exactly.

Automatic transcription is now good enough to be useful as a searchable index of a recording, even when the text itself is too rough to publish. It mangles names, dialect and place names — which is to say it mangles precisely the words that matter most in a family story — so correct those by hand or not at all.

Where it lives so it survives

Two copies in two places, and at least one of them somewhere another family member can reach without your password. The commonest way these recordings are lost is not a hard-drive failure; it is one person holding the only copy.

Keep the audio next to the story rather than in a folder of its own. A recording filed under Audio is findable only by someone who already knows it exists; a recording attached to the chapter it belongs to is found by anyone reading that chapter, which is the point.

That is what Huminz does with recordings: each one belongs to a chapter, plays where the story is, and travels with it when the story is shared or printed.

When the material is difficult

Illness, war, estrangement, a death they have never discussed — some of the most valuable recordings are also the hardest to make. A few things help.

Ask once, accept whatever answer comes, and do not push. “Is that something you would rather not talk about?” is a complete question, and a no is an answer you record and respect.

Offer to stop the recording and keep talking. Some things will be said only once the red light is off, and that is their right; you can write down afterwards what you are allowed to write down.

Where something is told in confidence, mark it clearly for whoever inherits this — a note saying “not for sharing while X is alive” is worth more than your memory of the promise.

The short version

• Ask in advance, say where it will live, agree they can stop.
• Phone on the table, two feet away, airplane mode, test fifteen seconds.
• Forty-five minutes, one era, say the date out loud.
• One question, then silence. Follow the tangents.
• Rename and copy the file the same day, and note the best timestamps.