How to be the archivist of your own family

I’d always been interested in the stories my parents and grandparents told about their lives in Iraq, which seemed so impossibly distant from my childhood in 1970s London. It was only when I became a mother that I suddenly felt I needed to record these stories and pin them down somehow – to create an archive – so I could have a hope of passing them on.

My sense of urgency was sharpened by the fact that our language, Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, is going extinct. I charted my journey into archiving my family’s stories, language, recipes, culture and keepsakes in a book, Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture (2025), published in the US as Always Carry Salt. While I was doing it, I realised I wasn’t the only one to feel this instinct to preserve and pass on. Perhaps it was the fact that we are living through troubled times, or that my friends are now in midlife, but I noticed many of them were doing similar things.

If you too are drawn to the idea of making a family archive, this Guide will help you decide what kind of archive you want to make – it doesn’t have to be a book! – and how to go about it.

For one of my friends, it was losing her mother that prompted her to research her mother’s ancestors, eventually making a wall of photographs that ranged from black-and-white images of Edwardian women in picture hats to vivid portraits of her young daughters: a sort of feminist lineage. Another friend, about to move back to his hometown, found himself reaching for the snooker cue he’d inherited from his father who had died years before. It was not just a tactile and beautifully crafted talisman, but an object he used and enjoyed, connecting to his father every time he picked it up.

Whatever your starting point, there are many reasons to make a family archive. It can make you feel more psychologically whole – or at least declutter your loft. It can help you understand where you come from so you know where you are going – and it can deepen your relationship with your cousins. I found the process healing, settling, connecting. On the other side of it, I feel as though I am a stronger bridge between my ancestors and future generations. And I feel more confident about owning my heritage, experimenting with it and enjoying it too.

Don’t be put off by the word ‘archive’. You’re probably not going to end up with a museum-worthy collection stored in acid-free tissue paper and sealed in a vault. (Although you might.) I ended up with a book, but only because I’m a writer and writing is how I process things. You might end up with a photo album with detailed captions, or a shoebox full of treasured (but not necessarily valuable) objects, or a family tree, or a file on your computer with recordings of conversations with your grandmother. You might not end up with anything physical at all; the process might be more important to you than anything else.

You may want to go back centuries, or to cover only one or two generations. You may even want to make a sort of time-capsule archive that is a snapshot of your family now. You may want to explore both sides of your family or just one. Your family may have lots of what UNESCO calls tangible culture (like objects, documents, photographs, jewellery) or perhaps they might have more of what UNESCO calls intangible culture (like music, rituals, dances), and this will affect what kind of archive you make.

Sometimes you might feel like a detective, while other times you might feel more like a therapist. The research might be an intellectual exercise or you might feel connected back through the generations in a very primal, physical way.

This Guide will give you some ideas for how to make your archive, and different approaches and ideas about what you end up with. You don’t need any special skills, and it can take as much or as little time as you like. However you do it, making a family archive can be a hugely rewarding and meaningful journey to go on.

Set an intention

Before you plunge in, think about why you are making an archive, and for whom. For instance, are you doing it as a hobby or because there is painful history you want to confront? Are you just curious, or are you trying to preserve unique family stories or document precious artefacts? My main motivation was wanting to pass on my cultural heritage to my son but, because my family is part of a community whose story has rarely been told, I also wanted to turn my archive into a book for others to read. Being clear about your intentions will help to point you in the right direction.

Make a plan

Next, write down what you already know about your family – and what you have access to. Then make a list of what you want to find out more about, given your initial intentions for the archive.

You don’t have to cover everything – in fact you can’t. So follow your interests or instincts. There might be emotional reasons you are drawn to particular stories. I was initially interested in my father’s grandfather because, as a scribe who wrote Torah scrolls, he spent his days writing, just as I do – even if he didn’t use a laptop but vellum and a pen made out of a reed from the River Tigris. But when I learned that much of his work would have involved repairing scrolls others had made, his life of making and repairing became a touchstone for me.

For the oral historian Mi’Jan Celie Tho-Biaz, learning about her great-great-grandmother’s journey from slavery to freedom became a source of strength, as she told BBC Future last year: ‘My DNA is made of people who have defied odds, I come from people who worked to attain freedom and love. The huge stakes and odds they beat, just for me to exist … makes you feel like you have superpowers.’

Decide about scope. How many generations will you go back? Will you cover both sides of the family? If you live in the same place your family has always lived, or at least in the same country, it might be relatively easy to go back quite a long way using parish records, but if your family has been uprooted like mine, it might be harder.

Now, draw up a list of anyone you’d like to talk to, whether to gather stories or just to ask about your findings. I decided to interview just three family members, and to start with my grandmother, as her story began further back in time, and then talked to my parents, so that I was having the conversations in roughly chronological order. I asked their permission and made sure they were comfortable with the idea; your relatives may well be anxious, so it’s worth starting by listening to their concerns, and trying to address them.

If there are sensitivities – perhaps someone doesn’t want a secret spilled, or there’s bad blood between relatives – you might be selective in who you speak to. Alternatively, perhaps you’ll interview everyone and let the contradictions speak for themselves. The novelist Kevin Nguyen wrote in The New York Times this year that when his father interviewed his family about their life in Vietnam and they all disagreed, he felt these inconsistencies were ‘the beauty of it’, and that the different stories had a Rashomon effect that added up to ‘an emotional history’ rather than a factual one.

Consider finding an ally or a companion. A relative might help you navigate tensions, or help with research, or act as a sounding board. Throughout my process, I kept a WhatsApp group going with my brother and some cousins; it was helpful, and also reminded me why I was doing it.

Finally, decide whether you plan to share your archive or whether it’s just for you. If you’re sharing, will it be with your children and siblings only, or the wider family, or even with a museum for researchers and the general public to access? Think about what this decision means for how you make the archive. If you’re sharing with anyone at all, you might want to make sure your notes are clear and legible – perhaps you’ll type them up as you go along.

Think of your plan as a roadmap. Remember you can always go off route. The potter Edmund de Waal started out wanting to write about the French craze for Japanese art and to research the cousin of his great-grandfather who first acquired the 264 netsuke (tiny Japanese sculptures) that he’d inherited. But he soon realised he had a bigger story on his hands; in his book The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), he writes about how the netsuke were passed down the generations of his Jewish family and daringly saved from the Nazis.

The next steps describe some practical ways to begin creating your archive. Depending on your plan, you might choose to follow all or only some of them (some may be irrelevant). Feel free to focus on what is most important and meaningful for you.

Make a photo album

Photographs are a good place to start for many archives, because most families have some, and because they can trigger memories and stories, so it makes sense to gather them before you start interviewing anyone. You may want to digitise the pictures, especially if you don’t have many, or if they’re deteriorating or scattered among different relatives.

As a technophobe, this terrified me, until I learned that all I had to do was take pictures of the photos. I used my phone. I photographed each picture, then labelled each file with a number. If they had anything written on the back, I photographed that and labelled the file with the same number followed by b for ‘back’.

Consider making more detailed captions than you would for holiday snaps, and leave space for what you learn if you show the pictures to relatives. Finding a group portrait of my grandfather’s family, I could (roughly) locate it to Basra, where he grew up, and guess at the date because his father was wearing a tarboosh, a felt hat worn during Ottoman times but rarely afterwards, but it took a conversation with my mother to realise that the child caught in motion, blurred, was probably my grandfather’s brother who had died at seven. I would never have been able to find this out by myself. I hadn’t even known he existed.

Make a family cookbook

If there is a cookbook that’s popular among your older relatives, especially if they come from a specific food culture, consider getting a copy and annotating it – for example, noting the dishes used for specific family occasions such as festivals or birthdays. Or you might find what you need online; in her book Crying in H Mart (2021), the musician Michelle Zauner describes how she felt cut off from the Korean part of herself after she lost her mother, and learned from a Korean YouTuber called Maangchi the family recipes her mother had never had time to pass on.

Ask relatives for recipes they have written down that you can photograph – so you’re not just recording the recipes but their handwriting, their doodles, their notes. Or video them making special dishes, and write up the recipes afterwards. Also, ask them to reminisce about any rituals attached to the recipes, or about favourite childhood foods: this often unlocks amazing memories, and might prompt more recipes too.

Catalogue your heirlooms

This sounds grand, but I mean any physical thing that you’ve inherited – valuable or everyday. Take photographs of what you have, and write down whatever you find out about it.

Think about how to look after your heirlooms; you might ask a jeweller to buff up jewellery, get a painting framed, or restore a piece of furniture.

You might also want to use your heirlooms. In The Heart-Shaped Tin (2025), the food writer Bee Wilson explores the memories that kitchenware holds, and the magic of using even the most mundane kitchen objects when they have been handed down and carry love. For many years, her friend the chef and food writer Roopa Gulati felt that her parents’ precious ‘best’ china was too good to use, and feared that she wouldn’t be able to bear it if it broke. But when Gulati’s husband was diagnosed with a brain tumour, she started using the china, so it would hold the foods she made, witness the conversation of another generation, her children, and make even breakfast a celebration. If you have been storing and protecting your heirlooms, it might feel more life-enhancing, and keep more memories alive, to use them.

Interview relatives and write down their stories

I thought I knew my family’s stories but many I’d heard piecemeal, in an interrupted way or by eavesdropping. I’d mixed them up, got the sequence wrong, or never asked the questions I needed to make sense of things – and my family had protected me from painful things. Whether you know your family’s stories or not, sitting down with your relatives and asking questions can be revelatory.

I began by checking they were happy to talk. I explained what I was doing, and why. I told them I’d like to record and that I’d visit them at home whenever was convenient, so they were more comfortable, and I could record without background noise, and also because they often had photos to show me.

I prepared before my visit by generating ideas for clear and open-ended questions based on reading relevant books or family documents and by drawing on what I knew already about favourite foods and earliest childhood memories. I used photos and objects to spark memories. To put them at their ease, I brought a notebook, not a laptop.

Once there, I had a cup of tea or a meal with them and chatted about normal things before getting out my phone to record; a phone felt less scary than any other device. I didn’t interrogate anyone; I made it a conversation. If they didn’t remember details, I made a note to ask again. I always went more than once, because I had follow-up questions, and also because they often remembered more after I’d stopped recording.

I kept the recordings as well as the transcripts because it wasn’t just the stories I wanted but their voices and quirks too. I chose to write up the stories, but you don’t have to.

Archive letters, diaries and documents

If you’re lucky enough to have letters and diaries from family members, this could be quite a crucial part of your archive, and you might want to transcribe them and give them context through interviews and research.

Even if, like me, you have next to nothing, you might want your archive to include some of the basic documents, such as birth, marriage, civil partnership and death certificates, and possibly immigration and adoption records. These documents can provide footholds to help you research further, and sometimes they can illuminate lost stories.

If the documents are lost, you can often track them down. In the UK, good resources include the General Register Office (for births, marriages and deaths), the London Archives (for parish, tax, education and poorhouse records), the National Archives (for military records, wills, immigration documents) and the Find My Past website. If you live elsewhere, your own country is likely to have similar resources.

Make a playlist

If music is important to your family, you may want to make a playlist with the reasons why, or to gather sheet music, to catalogue a vinyl collection or even learn a particular dance. When my son was born, I wanted to sing him Iraqi Jewish lullabies but my family didn’t know any. However, I learned a song traditionally sung by the mother of the groom before a wedding, and I have written it down, with several verses and variations, so that hopefully I can sing it for him in future. You might also want to trace a musical thread through your family tree, like the singer Pixie Lott who discovered her ‘musical genes’ on an episode of the TV show Who Do You Think You Are? when she learned that her great-great-grandfather was an army musician (it’s worth visiting the series’ website for other inspiring stories).

Sharing your archive

If you want to share your archive, make sure you feel comfortable with how you do it.

If what you’ve found out about your family’s past is difficult, think about how to share it sensitively. When the cultural historian Clair Wills uncovered the story of her cousin who was born in one of Ireland’s notorious mother and baby homes, lived cast out from her family, and died tragically, she chose not to blame her family but instead to argue for collective responsibility, as she described in her powerful memoir Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets (2024). You can’t change the past, but you might be able to help people do better in future.

If there are secrets, think about who might be hurt by sharing them, but also about the fact that Carl Jung called secrets ‘psychic poison’. Sometimes, sharing secrets can stop them being a source of shame and isolation. Talking about difficult things openly might also help you and your family, not just in dealing with old troubles but in facing what comes next.

Think about how to share at least some of your archive with pleasure. Perhaps you could cook everyone family recipes and then give them copies of the cookbook you’ve made, or play the photographs you’ve gathered as a slideshow.

Even after you share (or don’t) you will probably feel you haven’t finished. You might want to learn more – and relatives might carry on telling you stories long after you’d planned to stop. It’s OK to say no, and it’s also OK to stop archiving and then come back to it later if you want to. But you might find that archiving becomes a habit, a way of processing life as it happens, and even a source of joy.

Preparing for difficult emotions

Because of the memories or revelations it stirs up, archiving can be emotional – I wasn’t prepared for how much. You might want to consider speaking to a therapist while you make the archive; I did. I also found it very important to talk to friends and family as I went along.

You may come to realise you are carrying generational trauma. The psychotherapist Julia Samuel wrote in Every Family Has a Story (2022) that if trauma is unprocessed, it goes to the next generation, and the next, until someone is prepared to feel the pain and try to understand it; you may find you have to wrestle with or work through the difficult legacy you’ve inherited.

The inherited trauma could even be in your body. Working first with Vietnam veterans, then with Holocaust survivors and then their children, the psychiatrist Rachel Yehuda has researched how trauma might be passed down through epigenetic changes – modifications that affect how genes are expressed. She doesn’t believe, though, that we are prisoners of our biology; she suggests we can work through trauma through therapy, friendship, love, or channelling it into social justice.

Simply learning more about your family’s stories could help you understand the trauma you are carrying (if any) – and perhaps help you set down the burden, or carry it more lightly. I also found it helpful to think about the ways my relatives have passed on strategies for generational healing – I noticed the way my family gets together a lot, the way we tell and retell stories, and the humour that leavens the difficult ones.

It’s also important to prepare for the possibility that, rather than dealing with generational trauma, you may instead be confronted with its flipside: generational guilt. These discoveries might be uncomfortable, but there are likely ways you can make amends. When the Scottish author Cal Flyn discovered that her ancestor had massacred Indigenous Australians, she channelled her shock into taking some responsibility by confronting and documenting the crimes, raising awareness and fighting efforts to erase the past, which resulted in her book Thicker than Water (2016).

Whatever you find, hopefully you will finish the process, as I did, feeling more anchored, connected, grounded and rooted. I felt I belonged more, and had more of a sense of purpose; knowing where you come from really can help you know where you are going. The process made me forge stronger bonds with my family, too. And I’m not the only one. In the 2000s, the psychologists Marshall Duke, Robyn Fivush and Amber Lazarus of Emory University in the US asked children a series of questions about their family history. Their research showed that children with a strong family narrative were more connected, resilient – and much happier. It’s never too late to write down this narrative for your own family.

My book Chopping Onions on My Heart (2025) is all about the work I did to preserve my family’s stories and culture, and the feelings it brought up in me as I went along. Although it’s not a how-to, it could be a useful companion on your journey. In the US, its title is Always Carry Salt.

Katherine Wang’s 2024 article for BBC Future about understanding ancestry is full of great examples and useful links.

The Smithsonian Institution has a guide to oral history interviews, which is just as useful for interviewing family members in a more informal way.

The book Tracing Your Ancestors in the National Archives (2006) is an invaluable guide to doing just that by Amanda Bevan who has worked at the National Archives for many years.

Rachel Morris’s book The Museum Makers (2020) is the story of how, after a long career in museums, Morris finally opened the boxes and trunks and suitcases under her bed and tried to make sense of the family relics inside them; she told her partner she was ‘Making the Museum of Me’. The book is full of strategies and approaches for those who want to do the same.

For anyone dealing with generational trauma, I’d hugely recommend the very thorough and approachable episode of the On Being podcast where Krista Tippett talked to Rachel Yehuda.

The book Language City (2024) by Ross Perlin is about preserving dying languages by using them, speaking them, singing in them, and writing children’s books in them. He writes that being a ‘keeper’ is as important as being a ‘speaker’, and I think this is useful for other cultural inheritance, not just language, particularly the idea that you don’t have to be perfect, or know everything; your contribution is still valuable.