Ask HN: Cataloging Family Assets

3 pointskerrsclyde3 comments

Raised on another thread [1]: [I am] "trying to catalogue all of the family assets like pictures, audio recordings, letters, stories".

This is something I would like to do. Has anyone else done this effectively? How did you do it?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33490293

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Grab all the papers and pictures together, sit down with Grandma (or whomever is the oldest person in your family), and go through it all. For each picture, document who is in it, tell stories about where it came from, record it all. When you are done, digitize it, publish it on paper, whatever makes you happy. But the time spent with the people who are around to talk about it all is not only the key to getting all the information correct, but also a meaningful way to pass knowledge around, and is not time you'll feel is wasted once the older folk are gone.

I would recommend using video to document the interview. It becomes an asset in its own right and allows annotation of the artifacts later by anyone else.

On the other hand, the story is infinitely more important than correctness.

You start and just do the hard messy work.

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