![]() Rather than just picking a few questions each month, they answer every single one. At ages 83 and 81, the Stanleys feel much more comfortable with audio than video, and they appreciate having the questions available in advance. ![]() ![]() The digital recorder creates audio files that she can easily upload to her computer when she gets home. Once a month, Kim and her sister sit down with their parents, Lynne and Elaine Stanley, and spend an hour or two recording their conversations on the digital recorder. “They wanted their stories to be told, but they had no idea how to go about it.” Kim’s Approach: Monthly Audio Interviews “It’s exactly what my parents wanted,” she says. She also bought a digital audio recorder and recruited her sister’s help. She included the questions in a notebook to give her parents for Christmas. Kim printed all 144 questions, which are divided into 12 categories such as Goals and Achievements, Holidays and Traditions, and Love and Friendship. “They have stories to tell, but you have to sit down with them and ask them the questions for them to have that opportunity.” As she listened to discussions about the project, Kim felt an overwhelming prompting-and an unexpected urgency-to start preserving her parents’ history now.“They’re at this time in their lives where they’re cleaning out a lot of boxes and organizing memories and pictures,” Kim says. The questions are available to download in various formats. It features 144 questions to choose from that are divided into 12 monthly themes. The #52stories project encourages participants to preserve one personal or family story every week for a year. Kim, an empty nester who works in the Public Affairs Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was sitting in a meeting about the #52stories project last year when a thought hit her: “I need to be interviewing my parents.” Kim Farah: Preserving Stories from Aging Parents It just takes commitment, a bit of a routine, and insightful journaling prompts from the #52stories project. Their experiences, while very different from one another, prove that preserving family stories doesn’t have to be all-consuming or overwhelming. The following stories show how two women have embarked on journaling projects with the goal of recording important memories, experiences, and insights so they’re not lost to history. Ask them of your aging and younger relatives. The only way to guard against being left with dozens of unanswered questions after our loved ones pass away is to ask those questions now. If we’re lucky, the subjects of our questions are still just a phone call away. Questions about our parents and grandparents arise throughout our lives. I’d really like to ask my mom about her relationship with her father. I wish I knew more about great-grandpa’s experiences in the war. I wonder what it was like for my grandma to work day in and day out in their small-town café, with five young children at home.
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