How are you preserving your cherished family stories?
All families have stories they consider precious. Too often however, these truly irreplaceable treasures are lost as generations advance.
Family Audio History (FAH) can help you preserve these invaluable stories and rich histories, in the voice of the teller, through carefully personalized oral interviews.
No matter what you’re seeking to preserve, we start with our standard questions, and you can add or subtract to them as desired.
The resulting high-quality recording is yours, and is easily sharable with everyone in your family.
I know the great satisfaction of being able to hear a departed loved one’s voice telling their life story through a logical sequence of questions. And since you’ll be talking with an experienced interviewer who can follow appropriate tangents, and return to the main thread in a way that sounds planned, you’ll be most pleased with the final product you receive.
Storytelling between generations is a uniquely and inherently human activity. This leads to the question…
What stories do you want to preserve for your (grand)children?
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Why Work With Us
In the online world of voiced-memory-preservation, you can choose from several models used to archive family knowledge.
At Family Audio History, we use an audio-only approach designed as a one-on-one ‘radio-style’ interview. We do this to save you time, effort and money.
We understand you want your recording produced without you needing to dedicate a lot of time or effort. When you choose to work with us, you could limit your participation to a brief pre-interview consultation, and then being interviewed. We’ve organized our carefully constructed questions to help reveal the key information you want to share. If you want to be more involved, you can choose, edit, and suggest questions depending on what you want from the interview.
Since we make this about you, FAH, unlike many others who provide memory preservation services, will never:
- force you into an annual, auto-renewing subscription to our service
- inundate you with weekly messages prompting you to reply
- require you to do more work than you want to complete your project
- make you wait an entire year to finish your project
- demand that you pay repeatedly for each copy of a recording you want.
Once your order is finished, the one copy you receive can become however many you need. You can just give a copy to anyone you want, or post it online and send links to whoever you like. You’ll never need to buy more copies of that recording.
Important Pitfalls You Avoid with Us
Writing, writing, and more writing
Many other memory-preservation businesses require that their customers type out all their recollections into an online platform. If that sounds like a lot of homework to you, it is. The quality of the final product you receive is 100% dependent on how much typing you expect yourself, or a (perhaps elderly) relative to do. Anyone who prefers speaking to writing gets no accommodation.
Many months of weekly homework
Creating a book to preserve family memories often takes six to twelve months. This is due to the quantity of written responses needed to accumulate enough content for a book. If you skip a prompt, then you’ve got extra pressure to finish two the next week. If you can’t, you continue to fall further behind, delaying your ability to get what you want. If that weekly work builds up, it may reduce your interest in offering all the details you otherwise would.
Limited customization options
Other services often allow some level of customization, but with FAH, if you want, we’ll let you completely customize your entire interview experience.
Web platform reliability
If you’re considering using a web-based service to safeguard your family stories and knowledge, you need to know their website is stable. Do you know how to do that?
You don’t want to type in a long response, click ‘submit’, and receive a message that some error deleted it. That’s never a problem with FAH, since you don’t need to type or submit anything (unless it’s a photo gallery ready for narration). Our content is primarily audio, spoken by you.
Time consuming editing
Finishing a compiled book takes a l-o-n-g time. After typing out your first draft answers to a mountain of prompts, that text will need polishing. Families can spend countless hours confirming and resequencing stories, refining grammar, and aligning photos.
Dictating answers doesn’t eliminate this problem either. If you’re a detail-oriented editor, all this work might be satisfying, but most find it far more time-consuming than expected or desired. It can ruin the excitement of creating this unique record. So why do this when you don’t have to?
With FAH, once we record your interview, your required participation is done. We handle all the editing and mastering of your audio. When we deliver the final product to you, if you decide some part needs more work, we’ll do it at no extra cost.
Extra copies add up quickly
Most other memory-preservation businesses will charge you for every extra copy of their product that you want. Family Audio History never will. Once you have your recording, it’s yours, and you can make as many copies as you like, share it online, any thing you want.
It may seem enticing to spend just $99 on a memory book, but that’s just one book. While a low initial price may attract customers, most families want extra copies to give to relatives, maybe even close friends. Those extra books aren’t cheap, and the other providers know it.
How many books would you want for your family? What if you want 15 extra copies; are you ready to pay over $1000? What about nearly nearly $2000 for 30 extra copies?