I was speaking with a lovely fella the other day, he once worked with my father and is half way between my age and my dads. As you would expect I was asking a lot of questions about his past, his youth and his upbringing. His father left when he was just a few months old never to be seen or heard from again.

He spent a lot of his childhood with his maternal grandparents as you would expect and after moving around England several times, went on to join the Navy. He had such an interesting life and of course we will record a Life Log at some stage as soon as I can get to the country and spend some time sitting with him. Because this fella is smart he has all of this written down of course so that his children and their children can understand it. But I still want to get it recorded, which got me to thinking why.

A Microsoft word file is a perfectly adequate way of relaying information of a historical nature after all. But how much better would that all that information be in a chat, as a series of stories in his own voice. I reckon about one million times. In my mind’s eye I see his grandchildren or his great grand children, as thirty year olds, or however old you are when you first get interested in the family history, so perhaps even older than that. I see them either reading a word file on a computer screen or listening to their great grand father telling his story. His voice, his delivery, his accent, indeed all the little bits and pieces that you can never capture in a word file.

Not only that but in a Life Log we get into the stuff that most people would never write down. The aim of the Life Log recording is to capture you, to show people what makes you tick, what gets you excited and what makes you misty. I’m pretty sure most of that will not be in any word file. I will let you know how it goes.