If you want to record your life history, you are not alone

Documenting a life personal history or ‘life caching’, has never been so popular. More than 100 companies in the USA offer services to make it easier, and the UK is fast catching up. Read on for three ways to bring your memories to life.

Write it

The company Life Diary provides a sort of grown-up ‘baby book’, in which you record an ongoing account of your life, year by year. For £19.95 (inc p&p) you get a hardback, 100-year diary with a family tree, individual personal profile, research questionnaire, family tree organisers and tips on how to begin.

At a more upmarket level, the recently launched LifeLines Press will work with you to produce a bound hard or paperback memoir. They will also record, transcribe and edit your life story. And they can supply a CD of edited extracts so that your family can hear as well as read your words. An A5 64-page sewn paperback with full-colour laminated cover costs from around £1,302 for six copies.

Bound biographies offers a similar service, with prices starting at £3,000 for two leather-bound volumes of up to 50,000 words and 10 pages of photos. Typescript or word-processed documents can also be turned into your own book.

The US-based company Lulu, will help you to write your own book, using downloadable software. You need to know exactly what you want, from page numbers to the cover design, but there are many hints to get you started and Lulu helps you to use free templates on its website. Expect to pay $17.81 (plus shipping) for a 40-page, 8x10 hardcover volume.

You can also create your own photobook online with templates provided by PhotoBox.co.uk. Prices start at £19.99 for a hardback book of memories with up to 50 pages and white covers. Three US companies, Legacy Memoirs, Biograph, and The Remembering Site, which is a non-profit collective, will also help you to collate those memories of what you ate for school lunch and your first kiss.

Scrapbook it

Scrapbooking involves compiling albums filled with annotated photos, postcards, stickers, drawings, old pressed flowers, cinema tickets – ou name it. Over the past couple of years scrapbooking has spawned a US market worth $2.6 billion and has experienced double-digit annual growth.

You can do it the traditional, crafty way by pasting material into a paper scrapbook – ukscrappers.co.uk is full of useful hints and tips to get you started.

Alternatively, you can go the 21st- century route and use your camera phone, digital camera, memory stick or blogging software to place photos and text on to free websites such as blogger.com or tblog.com. This is called ‘life caching’, and is soaring in popularity.

A lower-tech option is The Family History Box, £29.99 from memories-nostalgia.com. It is a huge box of archive-standard tissue paper/folders/scrapbooks, complete with prompting questions. The website has hints on geneaology, scrapbooking and preservation guidelines.

Family History Monthly magazine, is another good source of ideas. The Oral History Society will train you in how to make oral histories – getting started, techniques to use, how to look after the tapes and so on.

Film it

If you have boxes of old videos, cine films or photos, bring them to life. For £45 an hour, EDV will help you to restore old photos or transfer them to CD or DVD.

They will even send a journalist and cameraman to record you talking about your life and turn it into a ‘biopic’. The resulting ‘video biography’ can be anything from a 20-minute film to a two-hour documentary complete with contributions from friends and relations, photos, film clips, diary readings and a soundtrack.

The company Family Memory offers a similar service, charging from £385 for a basic interview and a 20 to 30-minute DVD or VHS film.

Another company, Bespoke Films, specialises in surprise This Is Your Life-type films to commemorate special occasions. Expect to pay from £5,000. Also worth looking at are the UK-wide cine transfer service and Family Documentary Videos, which from £500 will interview you and record your life story on digital audio or video.

Whichever method you choose, the main thing is not to keep those stories locked up in your mind, letters in a drawer or photographs in a box.

Your life may seem ordinary to you but we all have tales to tell. And to your family and future descendants your memories are not only their past but social history.

After all, who would know much about Samuel Pepys or heard of Anne Frank if they hadn’t put pen to paper and told the story of their lives?

This article was created: 18 August 2006.
This article was last edited: 13 November 2006.

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