Paper Doll
Organize Your Sleep When the Clocks Change and Beyond
Are you feeling wonky? If you live in North America, you turned your clocks back (or let all your digital ones do it themselves) over the weekend. (If you live in the UK, you did it a week ago. I don’t know what’s up with that, but you may still be feeling wonky.)
Although most of the negative effects of time change happen when we are springing forward to begin Daylight Saving Time, falling back to end it can still leave people struggling to wake up and feeling out of sorts for a few days, leading to some bumps in productivity.
So, if you’re feeling a little rough, don’t worry. Today’s post offers some gentle tips for feeling a little more at ease when the time on the clock and the time inside your head don’t feel friendly toward one another.
HELP YOUR BODY ADJUST TO THE TIME CHANGE
Whether you’re dealing with the time change in the spring or fall, the best way to adjust is always to shift your schedule gradually.
Unless you’re the kind of person who misses all the reminders about the clock change and shows up an hour late (or early) to Sunday brunch, or worse, for work on Monday, you have advanced warning. When the time change is on the horizon, adjust your bedtime and waking time by ten or fifteen minutes each night for several days prior. (Make a note on your calendar to start this at the beginning of March; Daylight Saving Time starts on March 9, 2025! I’m already counting down.)
This kind of incremental approach is supposed to give your body the time to adapt. Of course, we’ve just changed the clocks, so that option is out. Still, consider the following steps for helping your body adapt to the time shift. You’ll find that these steps are generally the same ones for attaining recuperative sleep, overall.
Be the Early Bird and Get Morning Sunlight Exposure
I’ll be the first to admit, I’m terrible at mornings. I’d happily take a flight or attend a Zoom at 3 a.m. before going to sleep, but I’d be hopeless doing the same things at 7 a.m. Early morning sunlight makes me growl. However, my science-y pals swear that natural light will help reset our internal clocks.
The research on circadian rhythms says that cycles of sunlight and nighttime darkness keep our bodies synchronized with our environment and signal our “circadian pacemakers.” This pacemaker is particularly sensitive to light in the morning and the evening, so evening light (such as we have all summer) causes a phase delay, so we don’t get tired until later and then we wake up later. Conversely, when we are exposed to bright sunlight in the morning, it causes a “phase advance,” and we start getting sleepy earlier and awaken earlier.
Sunrise Coffee Photo by Taryn Elliott
So, exposure to sunlight signals your body that it’s time to wake up; just some light permeating through your eyelids will have some kid of wakey-wakey-eggs-and-bacon-y effect. So, actually spending twenty minutes outside in the morning will help you feel less sluggish.
If the temperature allows it, take your breakfast out onto your back patio or balcony; you can enjoy your morning coffee on your front step, but if you amble out in your jammies, at least make sure you’re properly covered up as the school bus goes by.
Improve and Optimize Your Sleep Environment
We hear it all the time: it’s important to set a consistent sleep routine.
If you’ve been living the life of a college student (or a new parent) and are all out of whack (and this has been compounded by the end of Daylight Saving Time), be patient with yourself. Know that your body will need time to adjust to whatever changes you make, but sticking to a regular bedtime and wake-up schedule (sigh, even on weekends) will improve your odds of getting better quality sleep and more of it.
Research shows that your sleep experience will improve if you consistently do the following:
- Keep your bedroom dark. Close your blinds or curtains. If you have old-style horizontal Venetian blinds, you may find they let in too much light. If so, try twisting them “backward” such that the curved portion faces outward. Alternatives are the more modern, wider, vertical blinds or roller shades in darker colors.
Another great option is a blackout curtain, which is designed to eliminate as much natural light as possible. Note that the longer the curtain extends from the bottom of the window toward the floor, the less light will seep out.
If there’s a curtain gap (which always seems to happen when you’re staying in a hotel), try pinching the curtains together with clothespins or the clips of a skirt hanger.
Admittedly, if you block out all natural light, you won’t be awakened by the brightness and warmth of the sun. This increases both the importance of getting into the sunlight once you DO wake up and also necessitates a less natural method for shaking yourself out of slumber. For the latter, check out Do (Not) Be Alarmed: Paper Doll’s Wake-Up Advice for Productivity for tips on heeding that wakeup call.
Don’t forget about tiny unnatural lights. So many digital devices blink or glow. My smoke alarm has a blinking green light. Routers and DVRs and all sorts of devices have blueish glows.
In my bedroom, I have an old-fashioned Caller ID box (connected to an old-school, weighty corded landline). It blinks. Incessantly. Every time I have a message, the red light starts blinking again. Listening to the voicemail message and deleting it has no impact; I must manually clear the Caller ID box. (Sigh. It’s a tradeoff. I love the large handset of this ancient phone, but it has no caller ID. The box serves its purpose of letting me know if the inbound call is from a delightful soul or yet another robocall about my auto warranty. But that red blinking light!)
If you’ve got bright or blinking LED lights on gadgets in your sleeping area (either at home or when traveling), consider getting a sheet of removable, adhesive blackout stickers to stem the indoor light pollution.
In addition to adjusting your lighting while you’re sleeping, train your body to sense the cycle of day and night by dimming your household lights as bedtime approaches. Experts say that lowering the lights helps signal your body that it’s time to wind down. Think about how you can gradually reduce your exposure to artificial lighting in the evening (without risking bumping into the furniture).
- Create a quiet environment. Quiet doesn’t necessarily mean silent. I prefer a combination of white noise: my central HVAC fan is turned to on (instead of auto, so I’m not constantly jarred by that thunk of it turning off) and my Rain, Rain thunderstorm app as I described in 11 Ways To Organize Your Focus With Ambient Noise. (Sometimes, what you want to focus on most is being blissfully unconscious.)
“Quiet” doesn’t only include your sleeping space, but also your mental space. Limit cognitively or emotionally intense activities before bed. Have you ever played a video game before bedtime and then found that your brain continues playing the moves in your head when you close your eyes? If you’ve spent hours reviewing a spreadsheet pre-jammy time, you might see those columns and rows and be unable to turn off your in-brain Excel.
For a few hours before bed, limit any activities that are emotionally stressful or require a high level of concentration. The goal is to avoid keeping your mind too active before bed, as that will make it harder to find your personal Sandman.
- Maintain some chill. The experts estimate that the best temperature for sleeping is between 60° and 67°F. Obviously, if you’re shivering, it’s going to keep you awake, but experiment lowering the ambient temperature combined with your preferred number of blankets. If you’re a “hot sleeper” or are at a period in your life when you’re experiencing hot flashes — let’s call them power surges — consider cooling pillows and bedding.
- Keep your bedroom organized. Yes, your eyes are closed once you’re asleep, but a cluttered room presents a few obstacles to falling asleep easily, or falling back asleep after a trip to the bathroom or to check on a tiny human.
I teach my clients that “the bedroom is for sleep, rest, and intimacy.” If your bed, nightstand, and floor are covered with children’s toys, you will be distracted from all three of those purposes, and you’re more likely to step on a piece of LEGO and wail in pain, keeping you from falling back asleep and your partner from sleeping soundly.
The bedroom is for sleep, rest, and intimacy. If your bed, nightstand, and floor are covered with children's toys or office work, you will be distracted from all three purposes. Share on XIf your computer is open next to your bed, or your work desk lives in the bedroom, or your credit card bills are piled near where you sleep, the chance of disturbed sleep is higher because those items will subconsciously cue your brain to fret over them when you’re trying to fall asleep.
Declutter your bedroom so that the floor around your bed is free of tripping hazards, and so the only things visible are those that are functional or soothing. I know, it’s easier said than done, but even taking a few moments to tidy your space (and training yourself and others not to bring non-bedroom-y things into your room in the first place) will have a positive effect.
Don’t be Blue!
As we talked about in Celebrate the Global Day of Unplugging, screens (computer, phone, tablet, or TV) and particularly the blue lights of screens from your devices, can interfere with your body’s ability to produce melatonin.
Find alternatives to screens in the bedroom, and consider different pre-sleep habits that don’t involve screens. You could journal, read a tangible book, do simple stretches while listening to soothing music, memorize a poem, or practice an uncomplicated craft. Define “uncomplicated” as you choose, but needlework that doesn’t require bright task lighting is going to be better than a craft that involves scissors, glue, and (eek!) glitter.
Don’t Do the Dew — and Limit the Moonshine, Too!
You may not think that one more fizzy beverage or cup of coffee will make a big deal, but a 12-ounce cup of Mountain Dew contains around 54 milligrams of caffeine. (An eight-ounce cup of coffee has 95 milligrams of caffeine!)
Caffeine can stay in your system for hours and have a detrimental effect on your sleep, so experts suggest avoiding it after mid-afternoon. (Yeah, I know this one is a toughie. What’s a diet Coke without the oomph of caffeine?) Remember, the goal is to relax your body so that you’ll sleep well and have natural energy for work or school the next day.
The experts similarly encourage people to limit drinking alcohol in the pre-sleep hours. One might aassume alcohol encourages relaxation, but it actually disrupts the sleep cycle, making sleep less restorative. For those who choose to imbibe, know that doing so earlier in the evening will minimize the negative impact on sleep.
Watch Out for Midnight Snacks
Experts encourage us to avoid heavy meals or snacks in the late evening. Larger meals closer to bedtime can take longer to digest and disrupt sleep.
However, if you’re hungry, that may also make it hard to fall asleep. Personally, I find that a small protein-packed snack and a tiny bit of carbs (like a handful of almonds or a few cheese and crackers stacks) helps my body find dreamland. Experiment to find what works for you.
Watch Your Daytime Habits
We tend to think of our pre-bed activities as the key to falling asleep, but getting our full eight (or more) hours requires a bevy of other self-care habits.
- Participate in an active lifestyle — This doesn’t mean you have to train for the Olympics or spend every day at the gym. But physical activity helps you sleep better.
Consider a yoga, tai chi, or qigong regimen in the evenings as shown in the following videos, or go for an early morning walk (with the bonus of getting morning sunlight).
Bedtime Yoga with Adrienne
5 Minute Tai Chi Flow for a Restful Night’s Sleep
Qigong for Sleep with Nick Loffree
If you are already active, just remember to avoid vigorous exercise close to bedtime, as it can be too stimulating, making it harder to fall sleep.
- Learn how to relax — It’s hard to conk out when our brains are focused on what’s stressing us out. However, even when we’ve cut down our mental focus on stressors, our bodies tattle on us. We hold stress in our muscles and joints.
In addition to practicing the physical relaxation techniques described in the above videos, find ways to mentally relax as you approach bedtime. Maybe you’re good at meditating — I’m not — but there are so many other options, too. Learn deep breathing exercises, journal, or take a warm bath before heading to bed. Do whatever you can, both throughout the day and as sleepy time approaches, to progressively relax your mind as well as your body.
- Hydrate throughout the day — We live in a hydration nation. Everyone seems to have a giant water bottle named Stanley. Being well-hydrated prevents fatigue, which helps maintain overall energy levels so you can avoid late-day napping, stay active, and adapt not just to the time change but to unexpected changes in your schedule.
An Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) report, The Cognitive Effects of Proper Hydration, spells out the key benefits of staying hydrated, including improved focus and short-term encoding of memories, better long-term memory recall, and improved critical thinking skills.
Additionally, research shows that “low water consumption tends to lead to worse moods, as well as headaches, confusion, and tiredness” and better hydration makes people feel calmer and in better moods. The steadier your mood, the more likely you’ll be relaxed enough to sleep well at night.
However, slow your hydration pace as you approach bedtime so you can minimize disruptions to your sleep. (If you wake up for a bathroom break, you’ll almost certainly never get back to that steamy dream with Jason Momoa.)
Don’t stop hydrating altogether, though. Our brain tissues have no way of storing water, and our waking brains need some hydration at least every two hours to function optimally. Drink water upon awakening to help you start your day.
- Watch out for naps — If you’ve had a rough night, a nap can help you recover, but keep it brief, to no more than 20 to 30 minutes.
Additionally, avoid napping late in the day (so, no pre-dinner snoozing), as it can interfere with your ability to fall and stay asleep at night. (If you’re feeling draggy, try drinking some cold water to pep you up!)
Instead, trying following one of the international approaches to early afternoon napping and recuperative resting that I outlined in Take a Break for Productivity — The International Perspective.
Additionally, the Mayo Clinic has some good advice for taking naps effectively in Napping: Do’s and Don’ts for Healthy Adults, and the book Take a Nap! Change Your Life. purports to change the reputation of naps for the better and help people improve their health through the right methods of napping. (You could always listen to the audiobook; worst case scenario, it’ll put you to sleep!)
Make Waking Up in the Morning More Appealing
For some of us, no matter how hard it is to fall asleep, we can’t bear to get out of our cozy beds. Consider organizing your resources so that whatever you have to face in the morning is desirable. Here are a few ideas:
- A pleasant alarm — that seems like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? — that gently wakes you, or one set to a radio station that will make you laugh or want to sing is a great way to nudge you from sleeping to wakefulness.
- A cozy bathrobe or dressing gown helps ease the shock of moving from your comfy bed to a house set more for cooler sleeping temperatures than warm wakey-uppies.
- A new shower head — TikTok kept tempting me and I finally gave in and bought one of those new filtered, hand-held shower heads. (It’s even got a doohickey so you can use it like a garden hose to clean the shower.) Whether you want a shower massage or a rainforest effect, upgrading your morning shower routine gives you something to look forward to. You may not jump out of bed, but perhaps you won’t grumble so much.
- A breakfast fit for Sleeping Beauty — In the ideal world, Jeeves would serve breakfast in bed. Failing that, aim for some special food or beverage treats, to make the morning meal inviting for the senses.
- Start a new morning routine — If you don’t have enough of an opportunity to read, put a good book by your breakfast setting and instead of doom-scrolling social media. Take a brisk ten-minute walk around the block instead of checking morning emails. Call your BFF (but only if she’s likely to be awake already) and develop your plans to take over the world.
Organizing your morning to do just a few things differently could yield all sorts of bonuses as the day goes on.
Organizing your morning to do just a few things differently could yield all sorts of bonuses as the day goes on. Share on XTake Your Sleep Health Seriously
If you have more than occasional trouble falling or staying asleep, don’t take things into your own hands.
- Don’t self-medicate. We already discussed how alcohol disrupts sleep patterns, but it’s common for frustrated sleepers to seek out other (problematic) ways to self-medicate via over-the-counter options.
Even the commonly suggested solution of melatonin supplements are not suitable for everyone. For example, melatonin can lower blood sugar, causing hypoglycemia in people with diabetes; it’s also contraindicated for people taking blood pressure medications, blood thinners, certain contraceptives, and anti-convulsant medications. (People who are pregnant or breastfeeding, or who have autoimmune or seizure disorders or clinical depression should also not take melatonin.)
- Talk to a medical professional. Paper Doll is a professional organizer, not a sleep doctor (and I don’t play one on television). If you consistently have trouble falling or staying asleep, confer with your healthcare provider to make sure you don’t have an underlying medical condition (like sleep apnea) contributing to your difficulties. If you do learn that you have a sleep disorder, you may also want to find a sleep specialist through one of the following
American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM)
American Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine (AADSM)
Your ability to be productive and organized in the daytime depends in large part of you successfully organizing your sleep at night. Sleep well!
WHEN WILL WE BE RID THIS INFERNAL CHANGING OF THE CLOCKS?
Your phone and computer likely change their own clocks. Your oven and microwave clocks likely do not. The clocks on my cordless landlines are triggered to change when receive an inbound call! I have a relatively glucometer (for testing blood sugar) and spent Sunday morning struggling with a multi-panel instruction sheet that made me feel like I was trying to fold a 1950s Rand McNally street map! There’s a reason so many people’s VCRs used to blink 12:00 all the time.
It’s not difficult. It’s just a little frustrating. We’re a quarter of the way into the 21st century. Shouldn’t we be past this by now?
If you are wondering why we still have to change the clocks, you’re not alone.
Those who would rather see the clock change go the way of the dodo cite sleep disruption and the resulting loss of productivity as well as increased risk of traffic accidents (in the spring and fall), mental health struggles (including Seasonal Affective Disorder) caused by decreased post-work/school hours of sunlight, and increased crime (because bad guys prefer their evil-doing in darkness).
The problem is that nobody can agree one whether to have permanent Standard Time (as in Hawaii and Arizona) or Permanent Daylight Saving Time. More than a dozen states have already passed legislation in support of keeping DST year-round, arguing it provides a better quality of life, with more light in the evenings. Paper Doll is generally in this camp. If you’re stuck at work all day, you probably want sunlight greeting you at the end of your workday so the winter hours don’t feel like drudgery. However, if you’ve got little kids, you probably don’t want them waiting for the school bus in the dark every morning.
Whether we go with Standard or Daylight Saving Time, there’s no way to make everyone happy, at least not until our AI overlords can update all of our clocks (and our circadian rhythms) in one fell swoop. Perhaps that’s why, although the Sunshine Protection Act of 2023 (which would have made DST permanent as of last year) received unanimous consent from the United States Senate in March 2022, the bill has languished in the House of Representatives. Sigh. How very disorganized of them.
Assuming our leaders don’t straighten this out, we’ll be changing our clocks yet again this March, so let’s at least take an opportunity to laugh about it, courtesy of the Holderness Family.
Paper Doll Post:
How to Collect, Organize, and Preserve Family Memories and History (Part 3) — AI & More
Who are you?
Certainly, you are your tastes and preferences, talents and experience. Nobody else has your abilities, quirks, and ways of delighting the world. Much of that comes from everything that’s happened to you, and everything you’ve decided to do (and to not do) since the days you careened onto this mortal coil.
But your very existence, in some ways, is due to those who came before. You enjoy the privileges or suffer the consequences of hundreds of years of decisions and experiences of your ancestors. War and famine, immigration and partner choice — other people’s lives determined, in large ways and small, your life.
Had your parents or grandparents or great-grandparents not come to the country where you were born, you would have had a completely different set of benefits and struggles, whether that’s bountiful nutrition and career opportunities or financial and educational injustices. We end up where we start as the result of our forebears.
Sometimes that means we’re always fascinated to know more about them, and sometimes it doesn’t occur to us until too late in the game to ask questions at all.
This mid-1950s photo shows Paper Mommy, sandwiched between her Bubbe (grandmother) and her mother, with her aunts flanking them. The first several times I asked about this photo, the only thing my mom shared was that she hated her haircut. Asking questions may take perseverance.
We recently did a deep dive into why we might want to know about our family histories and stories, and what questions can help satisfy our curiosity about things we might not even know to ask. Then, we looked at some of the major options for helping collect, organize, preserve, and share those family legacies. In case you missed those posts, you can pop over and read them here:
How to Collect, Organize, and Preserve Family Memories and History (Part 1) — The Questions
How to Collect, Organize, and Preserve Family Memories and History (Part 2) — The Methods
Today, we’re going a little further afield to see what other options may help you embrace those generational memories.
USE AI TO CREATE YOUR FAMILY LEGACY IN PRINT
Artificial Intelligence gets fancier every day. It also gets scarier.
I like when I ask ChatGPT to give me advice on how to make a blog post subject line more friendly for search engine optimization. I don’t like it when it makes things up out of whole cloth.
For example, in 3 Simple But Powerful Productivity Resources — Right in Your Browser Tab, I talked about Goblin.Tools, a 7-in-1 AI tool to help both neurodivergent and neurotypical users with time management as well as “tone” management. On the other hand, my colleague Hazel Thornton has written about both the good and the bad in AI in posts like The AI Gold Rush.)
In this series on collecting, organizing, and preserving family memories and legacies, I wanted to include these AI solutions as opportunities, not recommendations.
Recording audio or shooting video or turning narrated stories into written chapters is a lot of work. Grandma probably isn’t up for it. You also may not have the time for it.
AI, however, has all the time in the world. Why not give AI the chance to play the legacy-preserving version of The Jetson‘s Rosie the Robot and let it do a little of the scut work for you?
For example, if you narrate a story and the AI adds flourishes, creates chapter titles and sub-headers, and formats what you’ve spoken, you’re not wedded to it. You can always revise it. But you can’t edit a blank page, and getting something down is better than waiting until you can make it perfect.
The following are some AI-assisted options for collecting, organizing, and preserving your family stories.
Otto
Otto is an AI biographer, billing itself as a solution to create “memoirs for mere mortals.” It’s based around a simple voice interface, so you just start talking about whatever you want to share: your personal memories, family stories, life milestones, or recapped adventures.
You or your storyteller will get a prompt to answer some questions for about 10-20 minutes, making this ideal for anyone who may feel cowed by the idea of having spin a long yarn. You’re not doing an HBO stand-up special, just ten minutes of responses to weekly encouragement.
Once you’ve done your part, Otto creates transcripts of your recordings and uses artificial intelligence to develop a biography based on what has been said.
Open the app, hand the phone off to Dad, perhaps with a list of prompts (such as the ones I offered in part 1 of this series) and let Otto do the rest.
Otto creates chapters — the transcription is just the first part; the AI magic comes in almost as quickly as you can dictate. Review the chapters as Otto drafts them to ensure that everything you wanted to capture is there.
Worried AI might goof up and misunderstand something you say? The founder, Ashita Achuthan, noted that AI gave her name a few confused looks. So, Otto allows you to go into the transcripts and manually edit to ensure everything looks as it should.
The resulting biography, from what I can tell (without signing up), is digital; if you want a tangible copy, you’ll need to download the content (and perhaps combine with photos) to achieve a DIY book (such as I described in part 2 of this series).
Start with a free, 15-minute introductory trial of Otto to see how a chapter can be created with just a little chat. After that, a lifetime membership is $199, though Otto is in beta (having just launched this year), so the early bird price right now is only $99. With your lifetime membership, you get a 40-chapter biography, automatic transcripts, and access to new sessions and features.
introducing otto
it’s an app that turns your memories into memoirs
show up everyday for 10-20 min sessions
no prep needed. show up and talk
get chapters as you finish each session751 people using otto over last 6 weeks@_buildspace pic.twitter.com/lKmZtxcCC2
— ashita achuthan (@ashitaa) July 27, 2024
Ottostory
Don’t confuse Otto with Ottostory. (Gee, how could anyone confuse the two?)
Ottostory has a three-step approach for building a biography.
- Speak into the phone and Ottostory captures the experiences. It can be a long narrative, a childhood memory, or a life event.
- Select a tone. Depending on the individuals and the story being told, you may want a different tonal or writing style. You get to pick whether the tone should be “adventurous,” “romantic,” or “true to life.”
- Watch your stories become a book. Once all of the tales have been narrated and AI edits the content, the story becomes a bound hardcover book, shareable with family and friends.
Ottostory has a number of features to achieve the narrative result:
Flexible Interaction
First, Ottostory offers multiple input formats. You can integrate voice, text, and document uploads. Enrich your narrative with photographs.
As mentioned, you can select different tonal styles for the writing. You can also invite family and friends to contribute guest chapters, augmenting beloved memories with multiple perspectives.
Guided Storytelling
The process starts with Ottostory’s library of 200 prompts, developed by cognitive behavior therapists, professional authors, and publishers to “elicit meaningful and heartfelt responses.”
If you’re a writer, you may love the idea of taking all the transcriptions of Great-Grandpa’s circuitous stories and editing them into a comprehensible and comprehensive whole. If you’re not, you won’t.
Otto promises that their cutting-edge AI-powered storytelling technology will “seamlessly weave your memories into a compelling narrative” so you can take those stories, eliminate the repetition and excess, and make it make sense.
Once the individual memories are captured, Ottostory organizes the various tales along a structured timeline of key milestones or life events. Instead of a mish-mash of tales, it yields an orderly biography.
Ottostory also offers up to three hours of one-on-one coaching with professional biography writers to help craft your narrative and conquer any writing obstacles.
Customization
Users can custom-design a high-quality, premium book cover based on templates.
Once it’s all put together, you get both a bound hardcover and a digital copy of your book, enabling you to maintain a legacy copy for future generations and share your story now with loved ones wherever they are.
Timelines to complete an entire book vary, but the FAQ says that on average, an autobiography is completed over nine months. There aren’t any time limits, so your storytellers won’t be rushed and can work at their own pace. However, Ottostory helps users stay focused by providing a personalized schedule with reminders to keep going until the book is done.
Ottostory’s pricing is definitely higher than we’ve seen with the other services. It’s $499, for which you get a 7″ x 10″ hardcover book, including fifty pages for narrative storytelling and thirty pages for vivid pictures.
Memoirist
On the opposite end of the price spectrum is Memoirist, an AI-assisted biography and memoir service.
To get started, decide whose life story will be told, whether that’s you, a family member contributing their own tales, or the family genealogist.
Then, Memoirist offers prompts to entice the storyteller to relay important memories. Unlike the other platforms we’ve looked at, Memoirist then has its Interview Helper follow up on those stories with “gentle, insightful follow-up questions to deepen the narrative.”
Access Memoirist on your phone, tablet, or computer.
The AI takes it from there, turning the recorded “conversations” (between the storyteller and the AI) into a compelling story designed to “capture[s] the essence of your experiences.”
Once the story is massaged into final form, personalize the ensuing tangible book with various design options. You can customize the cover and final layout to reflect your preferences based on the kind of memories relayed.
Finally, users may order bound, high-quality print copies to be shipped and shared with family and friends.
Right now, early adopters can try Memoirist for free (discounted from $10) for an initial five chapters; it also includes use of the Interview Helper’s follow-up questions and a formatted PDF of your story.
If you like Memoirist, you can upgrade to a full version for $29 (discounted 70% from the full price of $99). In addition to the assistance of the Interview Helper, you can have up to thirty chapters (up to 200 pages) in a printed, hardcover biography. You also get “do-overs” of the five initial chapters from the trial experience.
Life Story AI
Life Story AI has three approaches. If you’re with your loved one, you can ask them the Life Story AI prompt questions; they can respond using the phone app and be recorded. (They or you can also type answers on the screen.) If you aren’t present and they’re comfy with technology, “Lisa” (the AI) can prompt them to answer directly. Alternatively, sub yourself in to answer the family history questions. There’s no obligation to answer everything.
Based on answers to the general prompts, Lisa will ask customized questions. The platform gives an example of, “As an only child, what kind of fun did you have?” From there:
- Lisa sends a new question weekly, by email. You or your storyteller can answer as many questions as desired. You can add photos to make the story more robust.
- The system records and transcribes everything, and can correct grammar and spelling.
- Edit or delete text as you like, and even add your own preferred questions or stories.
- Once they (or you) have put in 10-20 hours of material, the Life Story is ready to become a book.
- You can adjust the style from the storyteller’s tone to a more literary one.
- Customize the cover of the book — choose a title and import a cover photo.
- Add up to 40 color or black-and-white photos.
The end result is a 250-page printed, soft-cover book with high-quality paper for $99. Additional books can be ordered at $35/each (plus shipping).
AI Life Story
AI Life Story (see what I mean about similar-sounding names?) is yet another AI-assisted book biographer. Once you sign up for an account, your storyteller gets to chat with AI Life Story’s AI interviewer. The interviewer will pose various biographical and thought-provoking questions about backgrounds, interests, and opinions. The storyteller can respond by typing or voice recording.
Once the “interview” is complete, the AI will write a “compelling” story based on the responses. In turn, you can review and edit the story to your preferences. You also have the option of uploading photos and adding comments or other answers, as well as customizing the end-result by choosing from a variety of templates.
The collaboration yields a digital (not printed) book about your life.
There’s a free trial, after which there are two pricing options: monthly for $29/month (currently discounted for early adopters to $25/monthly) and an annual subscription of $228/year (currently discounted to $159/year.
USE AI TO CREATE YOUR FAMILY LEGACY IN VIDEO
And now for something completely different.
Storyfile
You know William Shatner. Whether your Shatner is Captain Kirk, TJ Hooker, or Denny Crane, as spokesperson for Storyfile, he’s got thoughts on preserving video versions yourself (as if you were a holodeck character on the Enterprise) to interact with future generations.
After setting up an account with Storyfile, you log in and select the questions you want to use as prompts. Storyfile has 1600+ questions, grouped as related topics, crafted to encourage vibrant storytelling. Categories include topics covering family traditions, events like vacations and weddings, “favorites,” holidays, children, etc.
In addition to typical biographical questions and genealogical prompts, there are extensive questions in categories we haven’t seen on other platforms, like military memories, prompts for Holocaust survivors, memories about 9/11, questions about personal and family COVID pandemic experiences, “Pride” tales of coming out and gender identity, and more.
The storyteller records their video responses (on a computer, tablet, or phone).
Now, you can share the interactive StoryFile via social media, email, or text. Visiting loved ones can then interact with the videos and find the answers within the StoryFile.
Think of it as a little bit like artificial intelligence setting up a Zoom call and blending it with time travel, yielding an almost sci-fi-like experience for family members to have face-to-[recorded]face interactions.
It’s called conversational video. StoryFile sees itself as transforming one-way video into interactive two-way conversations. Imagine recording your answers and now (or later), your great-grandkids can ask your StoryFile questions. The StoryFile AI then searches the video database of what you’ve already recorded and yields the best video response, making it (mostly) like a conversation. Again, kind of like the Holodeck.
To see it in action, watch the clip of CBS Sunday Morning from this past Memorial Day, showing how the WWII Museum is using this kind of interactive technology.
StoryFile offers a free trial, with which you get 33 free questions, unlimited conversations, the ability to share to social platforms, and one-minute video answers. (Video recordings are 720p resolution.) From there, StoryFile offers three levels:
- Pay per question — For $1 per question, you can select from any of the 1600+ questions to add to the 33 from the free level. You still get unlimited conversations, the ability to share on social media and 720p video recordings, but at this level the video answers are two minutes in duration and you get the ability to re-record your answers.
- Story Pack — For a one-time $49 fee, you can select 75 unique questions to add to the initial 33 and get everything else available at the pay-per-question level.
- Premium — For a one-time $499 fee, you get access to all 1600+ questions in 70+ curated life topics, unlimited conversations, the ability to share on social platforms and re-record your answers plus you can record five-minute video answers. (I’m sure they created this option for people like Paper Doll, for whom brevity is difficult.) Additionally, the video recording quality is 1080p (high resolution) and you get unlimited storage capacity.
USE AI TO CREATE YOUR FAMILY LEGACY IN A MIX OF MEDIA
Memory Lane
Memory Lane is a fairly new platform that seems to take AI one step beyond what we’ve seen so far.
Users — they call them “Storytellers” just as I’ve been saying throughout this series — respond to personalized prompts from Memory Lane’s AI interviewer, recording their memories. These can be stories, family recipes, private jokes, or advice on how to raise children or interact with the world.
The AI interviewer is designed to invite a conversation, not an interrogation. Trained to be “empathetic, patient, encouraging and kind,” their AI is developed by advisors — psychologists, experts in ethics, and professional biographers — to create an interactive interviewer to draw out the best from each Storyteller. In their words, they seek to prompt, “a nostalgic trip down memory lane – and at every step we’ve built our platform with deep respect for the profoundly personal, meaningful experience that is curating your legacy.”
After the interview, recorded answers are stored “forever” in Memory Lane’s private, secure database.
As each storyteller shares more personal and family stories, the AI automatically generates a professional summary and what Memory Lane calls a life story map as a record for future generations, whom they call “the Listeners.” (Again, this starts to feel like Star Trek again, only instead of “Who Watches the Watchers,” it becomes “Who Listens to the Storytellers?”)
Memory Lane offers a 7-day free-trial, after which there are two pricing options:
- a monthly subscription is $8.99/month with unlimited storytelling, 100% personalized questions, unlimited access for the entire family as “Listeners,” narrative tracking (to eliminate errors and make certain no details fall through the cracks), and one color-printed hardcover biography. (After six months of the monthly subscription, the book is free.)
- a one-time annual subscription for $99 provides a full year of access to Memory Lane, all of the features offered with the monthly subscription, and the hardcover book is free to be printed at any time.
Memory Lane is in beta, so some things may not be ready for prime time. (A few of the links are still wonky.)
OTHER LEGACY-PRESERVING OPTIONS
As I researched traditional and AI legacy-capturing options, I found that, just as with productivity and note-taking apps, or almost anything else you can find on the web, there are numerous options without lacking clarifying information. As always, buyer beware.
Of course, you could always hire a professional biographer to speak with your beloved family members. Consider starting with Biographers International Organization (BIO).
Finally, if you and your family are just getting started with pondering how to capture family history, just start asking questions.
Tales
Recently, an ad for a card deck/game appeared on my feed. (Yes, our AI overlords and their sneaky browser cookies are eavesdropping on my research.)
It’s called Tales, and its Life Story interview kit features 150 conversation starters, segmented into three life stages: early life, mid-life, an later life reflections. The arrangement is designed to yield a smooth conversational flow and spark memories and discussions.
Tales is available directly from the creator’s site, above, or on Amazon for $14.99.
Perhaps you can buy a game like this, or make up one of your own, before Thanksgiving this year or whenever your family will get together next.
Finally…
Recently, I was reading The Boomer Stuff Avalanche, an article talking about how “Millennials are about to be crushed by all the junk their parents accumulated.” That’s part of a different (and bigger) discussion. But here’s a final thought.
Your kids and grand-kids may not want your stuff. But they will want your stories. Share them while you can.
Your kids and grand-kids may not want your stuff. But they will want your stories. Share them while you can. Share on XPaper Doll Post:
How to Collect, Organize, and Preserve Family Memories and History (Part 2) — The Methods
Last week, in How to Collect, Organize, and Preserve Family Memories and History (Part 1) — The Questions we looked at why you might want to collect family memories and stories.
It’s easy to think that it’s all about “genealogy,” which can seem like a dry topic to those who haven’t delved into wacky and wondrous family stories. But we saw how embracing family history can do more than clarify what’s happening in family photos (or make those strangers in black-and-white come alive and feel more three-dimensional). Family stories can help tether us to a genetic continuum and weave us into a tapestry going back generations and extending broadly across time and locations.
For example, when I started my business, I felt like I was adrift, the first person to really “start” a business. When asked for her profession, Paper Mommy usually puts down “part-time brain surgeon” for fun, and while motherhood is an intellectual and physical triumph, it doesn’t ecacly bring in the Benjamins. My father was an attorney and judge, but in the late 1940s, he joined an already existing practice.
But focusing on those stories I told you last week, I can place myself along a continuum of business owners: my material great-grandfather owned his own bakery (with my great-grandmother, who ran it); my paternal grandfather, who co-owned a tailors’ notions shop; my maternal grandfather, who traded in scrap metal (though decommissioned battleships seem more grandiose than “scrap” would imply).
Last week’s post also detailed a wide variety of questions to help get conversations started about family history and memories. We know that some people (and some generations) find it hard to talk about themselves, so it’s no surprise their children don’t ask questions; they don’t realize there’s anything to ask! Hopefully, the prompts I provided last week will give you a starting point to talk with your family about the rich tapestry of their lives.
But what will you do with these stories once you’ve gathered them, and how will you preserve them for future generations?
HOW TO CAPTURE MEMORIES AND STORIES — THE BASICS
Capturing your loved ones’ stories can be as simple or as robust as you choose, and you don’t necessarily have to invest in apps or platforms in order to create a record of someone’s legacy.
Take notes
Start with the basics. If you just want to make sure you get the details of what happened, you could take notes as your Grandpa tells his stories.
Scribbling notes by hand can be more surreptitious; even though we know that taking notes on our phones or computers is more efficient, and putting them into Evernote or even a Google doc will come easily, typing while they’re talking may seem dismissive to older folks. (Don’t we all feel like our doctors aren’t paying attention to us when they stay buried in their computers, tapping away as we describe our ills?)
There are only slightly more complex technological options that, once they are set up, allow you to interact more freely and naturally.
Capture your conversation with audio
The voice memo function on your phone or computer is a good choice when you’re in the middle of cooking or traveling and your relative surprises you by telling a story. You can quickly record them without missing a detail.
On iPhone, use the robust Voice Memo app. (It’s in your utilities folder, but for easier access, put it on your home screen.) On Android, use the built-in Sound Recorder app or download any of a variety of free or paid audio apps.
Shoot video of family stories
Using video adds even more color to a family story than just audio, but capturing it can be touchy. The last thing you want is for your Auntie to feel like the paparazzi are sticking cameras in her face, and you don’t want her to be focused on how she looks.
GenZ, Gen A, and younger millennials use their phones as if they are extensions of their fingers. Depending on your age and experience, you may be all-thumbs or quite adept at shooting video with your phone. The more easily you grab your phone and unobtrusively focus and hold it still, the more at ease Great-Grandma will be at telling her story of how she came to America.
If you can turn on your phone, set it up to stay steady, and give all of your attention to the narrative, everything will go more smoothly. Otherwise, develop a shorthand with your teen or tween, so while they play cinematographer, it lets you take the role of interviewer.
Set up a remote video call
The above options work great if you’re taking advantage of serendipity and spontaneously capturing a relative telling a story. But if you want to plan to capture memories, you’ll need to add some structure.
One good option is setting up Zoom, or any similar remote video service, and starting a conversation that way. There are a view key issues to consider:
- Ease of use — The basics of Zoom aren’t difficult; Paper Mommy is 88, and like most people, she took to using Zoom during the pandemic. But the email invitations, with the myriad links and phone numbers, can be overwhelming to users of all ages. When you set up a call, make sure that your interviewee(s) have as little confusion as possible; pare down the instructions to the absolute essentials or do it when someone in the family or a friend can help them set up. Nobody is at their storytelling best after thirty minutes of fighting their technology.
- Preparation vs. capturing lightning in a bottle — You know your family members. Some might freeze up if they’re asked questions; if their Nervous Nellies, send them at least a few of the prompting questions a day or two in advance. Other folks work best when they are spontaneous. You’ll need different methods for different family members.
- Recording — Pick a robust video platform option that allows you to record the call and access the file quickly and easily.
- Screen-sharing and other features — If you want to use photos to help prompt someone’s recall, make sure your video platform has a screen-sharing function, and set up the photos in a folder or slide-show, so you aren’t so distracted by the fiddly stuff that you break up the flow of your storyteller’s narrative.
You can work your way through the prompt questions I provided last week, but be sure you leave space for them to go off on tangents and surprise and delight you with unexpected tales!
Incorporate family photos into their stories
If you are handy with DIY, there are online companies where you can combine photos and text (like family stories) into a photo book (or a series of them). Popular sites include:
- Shutterfly — Browse from a collection of templates, select one, and upload your photos in JPEG format) into the pre-selected slots. Then add text, design elements, and other customizations. Shutterfly also has a free 24-hour designer service.
- Mixbook — Customize the design complexity and apply styles and themes.
- Google Photos — With prices starting at $14.99, you can customize hardcover or softcover book with custom captions, text, and collages on any page.
The above options help preserve visuals, but offer limited space for narratives.
These snaps of Paper Mommy and my sister illustrates just one of a several family stories regarding my mother doing our hair. Here, Paper Mommy zealously, lopsidedly cutg my sister’s bangs. Luckily, there are no photos of the day I was sent out into the world with pink hair-setting tape still in my hair.
However, if you’d prefer a more white glove service rather than fighting with online settings, consider something like Jiffy Page‘s Pixorium. I’ve worked with clients to help them pare down their photos and then hand them off to Pixorium to scan and preserve digitally. They do a stellar job, but where they really shine is in helping develop custom story books.
Pixorium doesn’t just help preserve photos and make story books. Jiffy’s people are storytellers. Bring your photos, tell your story, even provide a manuscript of family history. Pixorium will listen, ask questions, and create a book that respects and reflects your family’s legacy. (Be sure to check out Pixorium’s YouTube page for great photo and legacy advice.)
Explore creative options for collecting family memories
The above options are more familiar, straightforward approaches to getting your family to tell stories and capture them, but if your family is up for some adventure, try something atypical.
This summer, I was intrigued by Perfect Pixel Moment‘s blog post on Medium, 12 New Ways to Preserve Family Memories, which included ideas like creating a family podcast series, developing a family blog, producing multi-generational family cooking videos, and more. Check it out.
What to do with what you collect
What you do with the notes, audios, and videos you capture is up to you. As with tangible organizing, you have to sort, merge, and edit your specific categories before organizing things into final form.
Whether you share raw footage or edit everything into a meaningful presentation, a documentary, or private YouTube channel is your choice. For now, focus on gathering and preserving the information while your storytellers are with you and up to the task of narrating their rich histories.
PLATFORMS FOR CAPTURING FAMILY MEMORIES IN BOOK FORM
There a huge number of services and apps designed to help you collect, organize, preserve, and share your family’s memories. The rest of this post explores just a few.
Storyworth
Storyworth is a subscription-based service. You select a weekly email prompt from the database of hundreds of “tell me about your life” questions. Your recipients respond with their own emails.
Unlike the broad, overarching prompts I suggested in last week’s post, Storyworth’s questions are more pointed and varied, including, “Can you sing your favorite lullaby?” and “What is one of your greatest fears?” (You can also edit the suggested questions or use your own.)
Stories are private by default and available to download by only authorized family members. At the end of the year, the responses to the prompts are bound into a book.
A standard package includes a year’s worth of weekly story prompts to help you interview one “storyteller,” online access for an unlimited number of family members (as authorized by you), and one 6″ x 9″ hardcover book with a black & white interior and a full color cover.
You can’t apply any of your own formatting, change fonts, etc., but the books can include photos. (The storyteller attaches photos to their email responses.) Once the responses are submitted, you and/or the storyteller can log in and edit responses and add captions to the photos, though some online reviews have mentioned the editing process can be finicky.
Extra books can be ordered, as follows:
- $39: Black and white interior, up to 480 pages
- $79: Color books, up to 300 pages
- $99: Color books above 300 pages, up to 480 pages
If you purchase multiple subscription packages, you can opt to blend multiple family members’ stories into one book.
A package is $99 for a year, with domestic shipping included.
Founded by Nick Baum to capture his father’s stories, Storyworth is independent and family-owned, and has been in business for over a decade.
Storyworth is best suited for a loved one who is comfortable with technology, in good enough health to read on-screen prompts and reply on their own, and eager enough to overcome procrastination or inertia and respond to a weekly email.
You know your relatives best. Will they feel like this is homework to slog through or an opportunity to shine?
Because stories are captured in print form (even with photos), they lack the vividness of platforms with audio and/or video. However, history tells us that print books will always be accessible, while digital A/V formats quickly become obsolete.
My Life In a Book
A similar biographical approach is offered by My Life in a Book, with questions selected from a database (though you can create your own questions to reflect the uniqueness of your relatives’ experiences).
Prompts come to your recipient via email, and replies are returned similarly, though there is a voice-to-text option, which allows someone to narrate stories directly into the online system.
Additionally, unlike the weekly flow of Storyworth, My Life in a Book allows you to customize the frequency of the arrival of the questions. Chatty Cathy can get them faster; Silent Sam can be asked less often.
This platform has a more structured biographical approach, with themes for the books:
- Preserving Memories fits the theme of tracking the lives of parents and grandparents
- Baby’s First Moments preserves important memories for new parents
- The Story of Us helps couples track their lives together
- I’m Writing a Book About You lets you create a book for and about a special loved one
My Life in a Book offers collaborative editing, so both the storyteller and any family members with access can help edit responses and even add photographs. You can also get real-time notifications to update you when your loved one has responded.
Users have input into the final book, including selecting from a variety of cover designs, choosing from a palette of color themes, and choosing different cover font text (but not interior fonts). Depending on the selected style, you may either select a pre-designed image or use a custom photo.
My Life in a Book is also $99, and shipping of books is free domestically and to Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand; there are shipping fees to other countries. Upgrades (at additional cost) include audiobook versions, additional print copies, and gift boxes for print books.
Remento
Remento is a worth considering if your loved one might feel more comfortable narrating a story rather than typing it.
There are still weekly prompts (which can include user-provided photo prompts), but the storyteller speaks the response into the system using a smartphone or computer; there are no logins or downloads, and reviewers report that it only requires a few clicks to get started.
Remento records and transcribes the recordings into stories printed as hardcover books.
Additionally, the books are printed with QR codes, which, when scanned, play the original recording used to write the chapters. Thus, future generations not only get the book, but get to hear the voice of the storyteller (at least as long as Remento is in business).
Remento uses artificial intelligence. Once the narration is recorded, you get to choose your preferred writing style (first-person, third-person, or transcript). From there, Remento’s Speech-to-Story™ AI technology turns your storyteller’s voice into a polished, edited written narrative. You can also customize the book’s title, color, and cover photo.
Remento is currently priced at $99, for which you get unlimited prompts and recordings, unlimited collaborators, and one premium, color-printed book. (If you subscribe to their mailing list at the bottom of the front page and are willing to get updates and notifications for sales and giveaways, you get $10 off.)
Remento is a little more focused on the journey (involving the whole family in encouraging responses to the prompts) than the destination (creating a book). All authorized family members can collaborate, watch the recordings as they’re submitted, send reactions to what’s been created (thereby providing the family storyteller with positive feedback), and select new prompts for future use.
As with the above options, your loved one will still need to keep up with prompts to get value, but the easy audio interface may make the experience more inviting than having to reply in writing.
Getting reactions on each uploaded story may be a positive experience (like getting a thumbs-up “like” on Facebook) or might be distracting and yield self-consciousness.
MULTIMEDIA PLATFORMS FOR PRESERVING FAMILY HISTORY
Books are fabulous, and your great-great-great-great grandchildren will probably be able to read text, as long as it’s not written in cursive. But if you want your family’s memories to come alive, and you want your own grandchildren to feel like they really knew your grandparents, there’s no substitute for audio and video.
StoryCorps
StoryCorps is a grand-daddy (or grand-mommy) of preserving family legacies, dating back to 2003, but it comes at it from a different perspective from most other platforms.
StoryCorps is a nonprofit project founded by a public radio producer, committed to the notion that we all have important stories to tell and that ALL of our stories matter. StoryCorps mission is to “help us believe in each other by illuminating the humanity and possibility in us all — one story at a time.”
I have a lump in my throat just reading that!
StoryCorps has a collection of more than 700,000 stories, the largest archive of its kind. Rather than creating a recorded family history for just generations of your people, you can create a story for future generations of people all over.
You have a few options for creating stories:
- Record with StoryCorps’ self-directed tools. If you can get in the same room with your loved one, use the StoryCorps App. Use my prompts from last week’s post, invent your own, or use StoryCorps’ prompts — then ask away. Alternatively, if your loved ones are elsewhere, whether across the city or across the world, you can record stories together via your web browsers using StoryCorps Connect. Either way, you can preserve your conversations using StoryCorps DIY resources.
- Alternatively, you and a loved one can record a conversation at one of the StoryCorps recording sites with the help of a facilitator. This adds a nice professional layer to the question-and-answer experience and may help your loved one feel more inspired. At the end of the session you get a recording of your interview and a copy is sent to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Talk about legacy!
- StoryCorps Mobile Tours — Each year for the last 15 years, StoryCorps has been going on a nationwide mobile tour. As I was writing last week’s post, I just happened to learn that they’re just up the road from me in Knoxville, TN, through the end of the month!
- StoryCorps Atlanta Booth — The StoryCorps facility at the Atlanta History Center has recorded and preserved thousands of conversations since 2013. If you’re in or near Atlanta, book an appointment to “interview” your loved one in person or even virtually, by phone. (They can feel like they’re on NPR, being interviewed by Terry Gross or Mary Louise Kelly!)
- Military Voices Initiative — This program provides a way for service members, veterans, and military families across America to honor and listen to their loved one’s stories. Book an appointment to preserve their memories (and your questions) in person or virtually at one of their Military Voices Initiative stops.
Some segments may even air on NPR, and I’ve seen beautiful StoryCorps personal histories set to animated video on StoryCorps’ TikTok channel. In fact, the following video prompted this part of the post series.
For more stories, see StoryCorps’s archive and YouTube page.
StoryCorps is free to all users.
Obviously, StoryCorps isn’t the right option for capturing an entire lifetime of memories, let alone the stories of all of your loved ones. However, the professionalism of the production experience may inspire your family members who may be dubious about having something to say, or who are shy about sharing their stories, to open up a bit. Consider StoryCorps as a way to delight in the storytelling experience and use it as an on-ramp for refreshing memories.
STORII
Storii recognizes that not everyone is going to be comfortable with typing their stories or even clicking around on an app or website. It’s designed for Great-Grandpa, who grunts at computers and cell phones whenever he sees them in public. (And for folks who, for whatever reason, have difficulty with technology.)
Storii uses actual phone calls to collect memories. Unless Great-Grandpa predates Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone in 1876, I think you’re safe.
Set up an account profile (in Storii’s iOS or Android app) for your loved ones to receive phone calls, whether on a cell phone or landline; alternatively, they can call in. (No smartphone or internet is required.)
Next, choose prompting questions from more than 1000 life story questions in their database (broken down into guiding categories like life, family, religion, career, or legacy), and/or craft some of your own.
Schedule up to three automated incoming calls per week at a time you know is good for your loved one, or arrange for them to call in to record their responses. Storii records and transcribes the calls, and adds them to your profile.
Record interactive responses. You and other family members can listen to the recordings and respond with audio, video, photo, and text responses.
Access the recordings as audiobooks or downloadable PDF books. Recordings can be shared with other family members by secure links or via emails.
If you think your storytellers won’t be at ease if they’re “surprised” by a question (even on a scheduled call), there are a few options.
They (or you) can log in to their Storii profile to see all upcoming questions (and remove, re-order, or add custom questions). If your loved ones don’t have (or don’t want to use) internet, and aren’t keen on getting you involved, they can call in to Storii at any time to hear their next upcoming question.
They can also just hang up after they hear the question on the scheduled call, and Storii will keep asking the same question until it’s either answered or skipped.
Storii’s pricing is $9.99/month or $99/year.
We have just scratched the surface of the DIY options and formal platforms for capturing, organizing, and preserving your family’s stories. But Paper Doll has one more trick up her sleeve. Next week, we’ll close out this series with AI-assisted platforms and apps for creating those family legacies. See you next time!
Paper Doll Post:
How to Collect, Organize, and Preserve Family Memories and History (Part 1) — The Questions
It’s hard to believe that we’re in the final stretch of the year; next month will be Thanksgiving, with the various winter holidays coming up right behind. It may be a joyous time spent with family or one marked by an empty seat at the table, a time of sharing new and old stories and, sometimes, grieving the questions un-asked and stories never told.
Over the next two posts, we’re going to look at ways of gathering and preserving your family stories so that future generations will have no regrets about what they’ve missed.
PAPER DOLL’S FAMILY HISTORY (AND FICTION)
Paper Doll is naturally curious. I have annoyed Paper Mommy (both as a child and as an adult) by insistently begging for tales. “Tell me a story about your grandparents that I haven’t already heard!” or “Tell me about when you were in school!” I urge my mother, to her frustration. She retorts, “I tell you things when I remember them. I can’t call up stories at the drop of a hat!”
As someone who is practically built out of words and memories, I can’t fathom it. Ask me about my first day of kindergarten, or my first date (an extremely embarrassing skating story everyone somehow remembers clearly) or the day I bought my car, and I can recite it as if it happened thirty minutes ago.
My family finds this annoying.
I find the lack of stories annoying. I want a complete biography, with footnotes, of my mother’s life — every conversation and experience I missed from the day she was born until I was a toddler, I want filled in. And the ones I know by heart, I still want to hear her tell them over and over again, complete with accents and narrative flourishes.
My favorites? The time in her nursery school education class where the miniature turtle went missing after the toddlers left, but (after a length search) was found in the back of a teeny toy dump truck. The time when my great-grandmother, who ran terrified of a dog chasing her from the streetcar and hid on the floor of the closet during thunderstorms, nonetheless ascended a ladder and climbed in a window when she was locked out of the house. (That’s my mother’s Bubbe on the far right, below.)
I know how my mother’s father came to America. He, his father, and his brother set out from home in Poland so his brother could take a boat to America, but (as you likely learned in Social Studies), people with diseases of the eye could not be admitted. (It’s an imprecise analogy, but imagine your nine-year-old’s pinkeye caused your family to be turned away at Disney World!) My great-uncle’s suitcase was thrust into my grandfather’s hands, and the teenager set off for America.
I’ve heard a few stories about my Poppy, some surely apocryphal. (Only many decades later did we start to doubt the tale of his job unloading cargo on the docks: a burlap bag of chocolate burs open, upon which he and his fellow worker filled their pockets with chocolate and ran away. Um, did chocolate ever come wrapped in nothing but burlap?)
Other stories were also questionable, such as when he told of a man running a food cart being asked for a hot dog. The cart only served fish, so the cart owner gave the man a fish sandwich, and the man was heard saying it was the best-tasting hot dog he’d ever had! (Years later, my grandmother, feeding my toddler uncle, urged him to eat the yummy hot dog he’d been requesting. It was a soft-boiled egg. Perhaps my Poppy’s story was the catalyst?)
Still, there are verifiable stories. My grandfather bought part ownership of a decommissioned battleship as scrap metal, and later owned an apartment complex he named after my sister. A friend researching genealogy found a Depression-era news article about him being robbed of of hundreds of dollars cash (because he didn’t believe in banks) but was not destitute because he’d also hidden money in his socks.
And once, my mother exited a downtown summer camp reunion luncheon to find her father — a Jewish man from Poland — at the head of Buffalo’s St. Patrick’s Day parade!
And yet, we know nothing of his life before he came to America except his mother was tall and that his father was, circa 1910, the captain of the town’s fire brigade. When my maternal grandparents were visiting in the mid-1970s, my grandfather slipped on the Buffalo ice and went to the hospital. Fed up with the pesky questions demanded by the hospital, my grandmother snapped when the nurse wanted my grandfather’s mother’s name, and made up a random name that sounded shtetl-appropriate.
Paper Doll with Poppy, circa 1968 or 1969 (The booklet we’re “reading” says it “will tell you how you can become a Computer Programmer.”)
As I described in The Great Mesozoic Law Office Purge of 2015: A Professional Organizer’s Family Tale, it was only when I closed down my father’s law office that I connected with his cousin and learned that my paternal grandfather, whom I always imagined to have grown up in vague immigrant-era poverty, was decidedly more Upstairs than Downstairs.
Indeed, until recently I knew nothing of my father’s father’s family, and have been fascinated by what my genealogist friend’s have found. I didn’t even know my great-grandfather’s name before reading this obituary, let alone that he owned a hardware and tinsmithing store. (When was the last time you heard about “tinsmithing?”)
I only knew of two of my grandfather’s sisters; two others plus a brother were surprises to me. Nor had I learned that my grandfather’s brother became a Broadway performer and impresario! Why was I never told these stories? My father was more interested in his future than his family’s past, I suppose.
Speaking of my father, he was a clotheshorse and chronically disorganized. So, I was amused to find this post, referencing my Great Uncle Mike “Harry” Bestry:
Damon Runyon wrote in Short Takes, for example, that Harry Bestry owns or owned “3,000 Charvet neckties, which is more than Charvet has now, 75 suits of clothes by an expensive tailor, 75 pairs of shoes, each pair made to order and nicely treed, and hats and shirts and overcoats and sweaters in similar profusion.” He added that a friend of Bestry once reported one could barely get into the man’s apartment “because of the amount of wearing apparel stashed away on the premises.”
There’s something odd about knowing that the person who created Guys & Dolls wrote about my relative. Odder still that this could absolutely have been a description of my own father.
When I was home in June, helping downsize and declutter the family basement, I found a scrapbook my father’s first wife made of their trip to New England in 1951 and a few after that. His bride’s careful penmanship next to each piece of memorabilia detailed not only their trip, but the era. On the same page, she extolled the virtues of a restaurant meal but also noted the antisemitism of the hotelier announcing that the hotel — at which my father and she (both Jewish) had been welcomed — was restricted. No Jews allowed. (They departed before nightfall.)
[If you’re unfamiliar with this era in American history, you might want to see the Gregory Peck film based on the Laura Z. Hobson novel, Gentleman’s Agreement, in which Peck plays a journalist who goes undercover as a Jewish man to explore post-War antisemitism.]
As I reviewed the scrapbook, I absorbed the details of each crumbling page which had been lovingly assembled over seventy years ago by a woman who died perhaps sixty years ago. I was fascinated by the notations of someone to whom I had only a tangential relationship, narrating weeks in the life of someone with whom I shared half my DNA.
Of course, family history comes with world history. I was fascinated by the prices on the menus.
At Keeler’s State Street in Albany (established 1864), a whole baby pheasant with sides of lima beans and wild rice could be had for $3.50, with desserts from 30 to 60 cents. (Eat up quickly! Parking was twenty-five cents an hour!)
Meanwhile, New Orleans’ Restaurant Antoine (founded 1840, and which still exists) cost them a prettier penny. It was a multi-page menu, but my focus was on the eye-popping price of $7 for chateaubriande! Splurge further: $1.25 for a Crêpe Suzette for dessert.
WHY CAPTURE YOUR FAMILY HISTORY?
This is all to say that if you aren’t inclined to ask, and if your relatives aren’t inclined to tell, it can be difficult to create any sense of family legacy, either for yourself for for generations that come after.
In her excellent book, What’s a Photo Without the Story?: How to Create Your Family Legacy, my friend and colleague Hazel Thornton details why you might want to gather your stories and those of your family and your ancestors. At the start of the book, she explains that doing so will:
- Give depth and meaning to your photos.
- Make history come alive!
- Preserve family legends (rumored or proven).
- Give children a sense of belonging and help them feel more secure.
- Make us feel connected to our families , and to the world around us.
- Help us better understand our families, and ourselves.
For more on specialists like Hazel, take a peek at Paper Doll Interviews the Genealogy Organizers.
HOW TO SET THE STAGE FOR ASKING FAMILY HISTORY QUESTIONS
In some families, older relatives may feel frustrated and put on the spot if they feel they’re being interviewed, while others might enjoy the spotlight.
Only you know what your relatives would prefer, but it may help warm up the interest (and the memory) to start with questions that develop more naturally, rather than seeming as though they’re being interrogated.
Share an activity together
Whether you are setting the table for Thanksgiving or the High Holidays, there’s a ritual to preparing food and setting the stage for a family meal. That’s a great opportunity to use the ebb and flow of the activity to tease out the stories of your mother’s or grandmother’s life, whether it was during the Great Depression or the 1980s.
Ask: Who was at your holiday table? Which relatives did the cooking? Did everyone follow traditional gender roles? What foods did you always have? What was the rest of the family doing while the meal was being prepared? Was it a formal or informal experience? Did everyone get dressed up? Was there a grown-up table and a kid’s table?
If you’re attending (or even just watching) a ball game, use those 7th inning stretches or longer commercial breaks to warm up the conversation. On a family vacation? Ask about the trips they might have taken in their youth.
You may know (or think you know) bits and pieces of a family story, so start there and be open to being corrected.
Go on a “road trip” whether by car or foot
Whether you’re going over the river and through the woods by car to a relative’s house or just taking an amble through the neighborhood to enjoy the changing of the leaves (and walk off a tryptophan-heavy turkey dinner), being in motion has a few advantages when you’re trying to prompt memories.
First, sometimes it’s easier for people to recall and share memories when they don’t need to make eye contact. As the two of you face forward, either while strolling or driving along, you can ask direct questions without them feeling like they are the center of awkward attention. (Of course, some relatives like to be center stage to spin a yarn; experiment until you figure out what each one prefers.)
Additionally, when you’re walking, the motion keeps the blood flowing, which may keep the conversation flowing as well!
Driving around the “old neighborhood,” whether it was a decade or half a century ago, can prompt stories. On various trips home, Paper Mommy and I have driven to various of the homes she lived when she was a teen or young bride, and it always prompts interesting (and funny) stories.
Share your own stories and seek comparisons
It may help to bring up a story of your own, or one you’ve heard. If someone you know recently got engaged, for example, you could talk about that experience and ask how it differed for them.
What was the proposal like? How did the parents on both sides feel? Who was in the wedding party? Was it rushed because someone was headed off to war, or planned in detail? Were there bridezillas in the family history?
Similarly, talking to your relatives about school, about finding their first jobs or setting up their first homes, about having children, about long separations or special occasions — all of these stories may be more easily prompted when you tell your own stories, first. Sometimes, people feel like they have no tales to tell until they can compare and contrast with another’s experiences.
Use photos or physical props, perhaps as part of the downsizing process
Eighty percent of our family photos were taken by my father between the mid-1960s and about 1980; there’s not a lot from prior to then. Later, I started taking pictures with my mother’s 1960’s era Brownie Instamatic (the kind with the square flash cubes you snapped into the top). I thought I’d seen them all, but on my most recent trip home, I came across a stash of photos I’d never seen before.
A little worse for wear, my mother’s 8th grade graduation photo from 1949 was an amazing time capsule. Starting in the front row and going left to right, and then moving back row-by-row, I asked my mom about the people in her class. Understandably, many had been forgotten, but names and anecdotes started to arise, and I even knew a few of the people in the photo but only as adults, many years later.
Use the opportunity of preserving/scanning old photos to start asking questions about who the people were, and how they fit into the family stories.
Similarly, as you help relatives downsize or streamline their homes, ask about the history of pieces of furniture, decor, heirlooms, and memorabilia you come across.
WHAT TO ASK YOUR PARENTS OR GRANDPARENTS
You’ll have your own ideas of what’s important to know and ask, but if you’re stuck, use these prompts to get you started.
Ancestors and Relatives
You might start by asking about the generations that came before. They may assume you know stories about relatives you vaguely, barely know (or don’t know at all).
- How did their parents (or grandparents on either side) meet?
- Where did their families live when they were born? Did other family members live with them?
- How did they come to live where they did — either how did they come to North America, or to the various cities where they’ve lived and settled down?
- What did their parents do for a living? — My paternal grandfather was in a business partnership with his brother-in-law; they sold tailors’ notions. My maternal great-grandfather was a baker, and the part of his obituary that notes that he “specialized in pumpernickel and bagel” always makes me smile.
- How many children did they have? (If their stories predate the mid-20th century, you might ask how many children survived. My grandmother was one of six daughters, besting even Tevye’s five in Fiddler on the Roof, but sadly one died in the early 1930s, leaving a bereft fiancé.)
- Did they have any fun nicknames? (Two of my great-aunts had “boyish” nicknames; Miriam was Mickey and Laura was Larry.)
- What were each of them known for? Did they have any interesting skills or talents?
- What stories do they have about extended family members? (My mother’s first cousin, Sandy Konikoff — and yes, I’ve forgotten again if that makes him my first cousin once removed or my second cousin — is a famous drummer. He was a session drummer on albums like Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen and played gigs with Bob Dylan in the mid-1960s. That’s him, below, on the far right.)
Childhoods
- Where did they go to school? Were they good at school?
- Do they have a favorite teacher? One(s) they despised? (Paper Mommy had a teacher who had a mean nickname for my mom. It’s probably been 75 years, but even now we don’t think kindly of that woman; meanwhile, I am still intrigued that my mother took Industrial Arts in the 1950s (from a teacher missing a few fingers).)
- How did they get to school?
- Did they each lunch at school or go home at lunchtime? (Lunch was not served at my mother’s grammar school, and imagining her bundling up and shlepping home in the snow for lunch prepared by her Bubbe — while her mom was Rosie the Riveter at the airplane factory — and then trudging back to school again fascinates me. It was a far cry from my mom’s daily trips to ferry me to and from school and the orthodontist and everywhere else in her Chevy station wagon.)
- Did they wear uniforms?
- Did they have extracurricular activities?
- Did they have to work after school?
- Who were their best friends? What did they do together?
- Were they good kids? Did they get in trouble?
- Did their family take vacations? Where? What’s their most memorable family vacation?
- What was the financial situation like? Did they have any awareness of how much money their family had?
- Did they get an allowance? How much? What did they spend it on?
- Did you have to do chores?
- Did they have their own bedroom or share it? What was that experience like?
- What big historical events do they recall living through? (You can always fall back on “What do you recall about World War II?” Where were they when JFK or MLK or RFK was killed? Future generations will ask about 9/11 or January 6th.)
- How far did they go in school?
- If they went to college, ask them to tell you all about their college experiences. Ask about where they lived and with whom, what classes they took (and why).
Romances
- Were they allowed to date? Did their parents set any particular rules about dating?
- Who was their first crush? First date? First kiss?
- Who broke their heart? (Paper Mommy is blasé about how many proposals she got, but tells lively tales about the bad ex-boyfriends. Most intriguing? The ex who sent her a dozen long-stemmed roses with a card that read, “May you prick your fingers on every thorn.” Some guys just can’t handle rejection!)
- To whom did they propose or from whom did they receive proposals?
- Do they have any romantic regrets? Who was the one who got away?
- How did they know they’d found the right person (if they did)?
- What advice do they have based on their experiences?
- How did they meet your other parent (grandparent)
Careers and Adulthoods
- What did they envision wanting to be when they grew up? Did they end up doing that?
- What was their first real job? Do they remember what they got paid?
- Were they ever in the military? Were they drafted?
- What were their dreams? Which did they achieve? What do they still want to do?
- What did they imagine the world would be like when they were older?
Whatever questions you ask, be prepared for the questions to meander into unanticipated territory.
LOOK BEYOND BLOOD RELATIVES
About a decade ago, while visiting my mom, I had a sudden urge to know more about how our dear family friend Jennie, much like an aunt to me, had met and married her late husband. Dave was a delightful teddy bear of a guy — similarly ever-present when I was little — and I asked if my mother and I could come over and have her tell me the story.
Jennie was surprised, but happy to share her lovely WWII-era story of romance. A soldier, visiting his girl and her friends, brought along his fellow GIs. Fresh from the shower, her hair was in curlers when Dave first met Jennie, and he seemed to pay little attention. Indeed, upon their meeting the next day, he didn’t even recognize her…but he fell in love.
(I hadn’t yet mastered taking a photo of a photo without getting a blob of flash. Nonetheless, don’t Dave and Jennie look like a promotional photo from a post-War film?)
Jennie passed away just a few years ago at the age of 97. While she wasn’t family by blood, she was my Tooth Fairy (Paper Mommy couldn’t bear those wiggly teeth) and even just a few years ago was the source of some fabulous phone conversations about Grey’s Anatomy. (She agreed that Alex would never have left Jo.)
Sometimes, your family legacy extends beyond the genealogy chart.
Obviously these are not one-and-done conversations, but hopefully the foregoing has given you some great ideas for how you might start your journey into collecting memories and family history.
Asking questions is just the first step. Securing the answers for future generations may require a different type of effort. Certainly, you can record these conversations as an audio note or video on your phone, or you may choose to take advantage of a wide variety of apps and services designed for the purpose.
Next time, we’ll look at technology, from simple recording to AI-assisted efforts, for preserving your family history.
Paper Doll Post:
Moving? Here’s Your No-Stress Change of Address Checklist
ADVENTURES IN MOVING
A month ago, my best friend of almost forty years called me from her car. “Where are you?” I asked, expecting her to be somewhere en route between where she lives in New Jersey and somewhere near New York City. I was surprised to find out that she was in Central New York, headed toward Western New York (where I’m from), to look for a house to buy!
My BFF and her significant other had gone to a financial advisor to talk about the usual financial and tax planning topics as they approach a decade that will see many changes — from the last of the “kids” leaving home to their eventual retirements. Among his suggestions was to buy a home. While that wasn’t feasible in the very expensive area where they currently live, they contemplated moving closer to the areas where both had grown up.
Apparently, the housing market is pretty wacky right now. Home prices are up 30% from where they were just before the pandemic, a mere five years ago! Inventory is low, and demand is high. The morning I spoke to my friend, she’d had a list of six houses to look at the next day; by the time we chatted, three had already sold. Forty-eight hours later, they’d bought a (cute) house!
Photo by David Gonzales on Pexels (And no, that’s not my BFF’s house, but it’s cute.)
One of my other closest friends recently surprised me with a home announcement, too. He and his new spouse live in the south in separate cities; they’ve been working toward finding a city that worked for both of them as one can work remotely and the other was contemplating retirement.
This summer, while visiting a friend in the northeast, they decided to explore communities within driving distance, and unexpectedly found their “forever” home and, like my BFF, closed on a house quickly. Their move is happening as I write this!
As my area of expertise is paper, my initial concerns for both friends involved making sure they were registered to vote in time (per my advice in The Ultimate Guide to Organizing Yourself to Vote) and that they’d get their addresses changed so they’d be sure to get their mail and not miss any important notices or payments.
WHY YOU MIGHT CHANGE YOUR ADDRESS
Is mail that important? I mean, most of us get a lot less paper mail than we used to. Fewer people send cards and letters; people post their vacation photos on social media instead of sending postcards. Many folks take advantage of a one-time $5 credit if they get their utility bills by email (or have them auto-debited with email or text notifications after the fact).
Still, mail is can be vital, and making sure that your mail gets to you will make at least one aspect of the moving process less stressful. There are a few different kinds of address changes:
- Permanent changes of address for all concerned — This happens when you (and possibly your family or household members) change houses (or apartments) and leave (theoretically) for a different home.
- Permanent changes of address of address for only one member of a household, such as when one person moves out after a divorce, ostensibly never to return.
- Temporary, but long-term change of address for one person — Let’s say your kid is headed to college. If she’s staying in town and coming home every week to do her laundry and “borrow” the contents of your fridge, maybe no change of address is necessary. But if she’s headed across the state or country, she’ll want to change her address for most things until May, when she either moves back or tells you she’s going to bum around Europe to find herself.
- Temporary change of address for one person — There are various reasons for this option, but all involve being away from your home (for work or other obligations) for a length of time, with an expectation of returning.
Last November, Paper Mommy fell and broke her pelvis, then contracted pneumonia, and due to some medical neglect that makes me want to punch walls, had three hospitalizations and two stints in rehab over the course of two months.
My mother didn’t need to change her address to the hospital or rehab location — a family friend was able to collect her mail and bring it to her. But my sister, who relocated from her home state to my mom’s house for most of two months (and worked remotely while helping with my mom’s recovery), did redirect her mail, temporarily.
Similarly, I’ve had clients who have home bases but travel extensively and long-term for work. One relocates for six weeks out of every quarter to train different divisions of her company.
Another client is a “locum tenens,” a Latin word that refers to medical professionals (or sometimes clergy) who work temporarily in different locations. For example, travel nurses are temporary healthcare professionals who are hired to address staffing shortages, particularly when patient volume surges or there are higher seasonal demands. Assignments can range from four weeks to much longer, and 13-week assignments are not unusual. Nobody wants to be without their mail that long.
Some locums return to a home base between jobs; others move from one job to the next, living in temporary housing in each location. Getting mail wherever they are feels a bit more like home.
HOW TO CHANGE YOUR ADDRESS
Whatever your reason for changing your address, you’re going to want to organize your approach.
Get the details right
Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Before you submit your change off address for official notifications or share your new digs with friends, make sure you have the details exactly correct, including the full ZIP Code with extension.
I live in an apartment, and my address includes a street address (that applies to thousands of residents of many hundreds of apartments) as well as an apartment number, which is mine alone. Over the years I’ve been here, several new residents have mistakenly listed my apartment number as theirs, and I’ve gotten their mail and packages.
If the mail looks important, I’ve tried to find the person via social media and meet them in the parking lot to give them their mail; if it doesn’t seem vital, I usually write “no such addressee at this location” and return it to to the post office. But not everyone will do that, and you really don’t want to risk your mail or packages ending up with someone who isn’t as cool as Paper Doll.
- Verify your exact address with your real estate agent, landlord, or apartment complex management. You may need to start the change of address process before you get all your paperwork, so be sure to clarify via text or email to ensure it’s correct.
- Don’t make assumptions regarding the address based on what you’ve seen when visitinh. On Friends, Monica Gellar’s apartment’s fictional address 495 Grove Street; the building you see on the show is actually 90 Bedford Street, at the corner of Bedford and Grove in Manhattan. You’re not a TV character, but your home may have an address on one street even if the main (or only) entrance is on the cross street.
- Double-check to make sure that your new home is properly identified as Road, Court, Lane, Boulevard, Circle, etc. Many subdivisions have similar street names with only the final qualifier differentiating among them. (Want to go down a rabbit hole? Read What’s the Difference between an Ave, St, Ln, Dr, Way, Pa, Blvd, Etc.?)
A few months ago, I was on the phone with a friend who built a home in a new subdivision. He’d been delivered a package for a home with the same number as his on the next street over. He thought he’d do a good deed and walk the package over to them while we chatted. Unfortunately, the next street over was not numbered the same way, so the true recipient’s home wasn’t approximately behind his, but much farther away. Eventually, he cut through some backyards back to his house, got his car, and re-attempted the delivery. Again, not everyone is that helpful!
- Double-check the directional terms, like 129 West 81st Street (that’s Jerry Seinfeld’s place, in Apartment 5A). Make sure you ask for sound-alike numbers (five/nine, fifth/sixth) to be spelled out (in case you get Mr. Rogers’ old 4802 Fifth Avenue house).
- If you’re buying a recently-constructed home, triple-check. Sometimes, a developer may change the street names between when the plans were submitted to the post office and the municipality put up the street signs.
- Check to see if your street is actually registered with the post office. It’s hard to believe, but some developers sometimes forget this step.
This is fairly easy. Look up your address on the United States Postal Service ZIP Code Lookup site. Enter what you have of the address, and it should return the proper ZIP Code, including the four-digit extension.
You can enter the address to get other details, the city and state to figure out the ZIP code, or the ZIP code to determine the right name for your location. For example, my childhood home is considered in Buffalo, New York, but known by other names:
WHO NEEDS TO KNOW TO KNOW YOUR NEW ADDRESS?
Once you know to where you’re relocating, start spreading the news.
Start with the Post Office
Submit a change of address through the United States Postal Service. You can walk in to any post office and fill out a change of address form, or file a change of address online. (The USPS page also helps you change your address for the purposes of changing your voter registration address.)
Click to identify whether this is a change of address for an individual, family, or business. Provide your full name and email address (to which your confirmation will go); USPS also requires a mobile phone number in order to verify your identity and mitigate fraud.
Select whether you will be returning to your address within six months (to classify whether your change of address is considered temporary or permanent).
Choose the date when you wish mail forwarding to begin. (The minimum duration for a temporary change of address is 15 days. The initial forwarding period is restricted to 6 months, but can be extended up to 1 year.)
After you provide your old and new addresses, you’ll be charged the whopping fee of $1.10, by credit or debit card, for security purposes.
Standard mail forwarding lasts for a year. After that, you can pay for extended mail forwarding at the rate of $22.50 for six more months, $33.50 for an additional year, or $44.50 for eighteen months. At that point, you should have cycled through just about every annual bill and notification and should be able to notify everyone who might have slipped through the cracks in the year after your move.
Filing your change of address with the postal service will cover most of your incoming mail, but is only temporary.
The following should help get you on your way to recalling everyone else you need to notify.
Notify Government Agencies
Only you know which government agencies you deal with at the federal, state, and local levels, but start with these:
- The Internal Revenue Service — It should be obvious, but the IRS really needs to know where you live. It’s also to your advantage for them to be able to find you; you don’t want to miss out on refunds, rebate or stimulus checks, or important notices.
Fill out IRS Form 8822; learn more at the IRS Address Change page. Alternatively, you can submit your change of address on your next tax return, by phone, or by mailing a written statement that includes your full name, Social Security Number, and old and new addresses to the address to which you mailed your last return. (Yes, you probably filed online with Turbotax, but that’s what their instructions say. Use this IRS page to find a good mailing address.)
- Social Security Administration — If anyone in your household gets (or soon will receive) disability, retirement or survivor benefits and you live in any of the 50 states, DC, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, or American Samoa, log into your account and use Social Security’s online system to change your address; you can also call 800-772-1213, Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. EST, but expect to provide information to prove your identity.
- Medicare — To change your address with Medicare, you must contact the Social Security Administration, as described above.
- Healthcare.gov — If you get your healthcare through the federal exchange rather than a state exchange or private insurance, log into your account and update your current application online. If you are moving within the same state, you can update your application online, by phone, or in person — but not by mail. However, if you move to a different state, changing your address is not enough; you will need to submit a new application and select new health insurance.
- Department of Veterans Affairs — If you or a member of your household has been in the military and receives military benefits (or will in the future), be sure to keep the address updated, either online in your VA.gov profile or use the Department of Veterans Affairs’ change of address printable form. Note that changing it in your online profile will speed the information across all divisions.
This is also important if you are the executor of a will or responsible for the estate of someone with military experience service. Make sure the VA can find you.
- U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — Most resident non-U.S. citizens need to report their changes of address within ten days of moving within the United States or U.S. territories; this should be done through your USCIS online account. If there’s a reason you can’t update your USCIS address online, you can download and fill out Form AR-11 to submit an Alien Change of Address Form.
Note that changing your address with the USPS will not change your address with USCIS and USPS will not forward your mail from USCIS, so you’ll want to jump on this.
- Voter Registration Offices — If you move, whether it’s across the street or to the other side of town, you need to update your address with your local board of elections. A change of address even within the same congressional district may still change your voting options for city or town council, school board, and other local issues.
If you move to a different county, city, or state, you’ll need to register to vote in that locale. As you learned in my post on voting, different states have different rules regarding the methods (in-person, by mail, online) for registering to vote and changing your address. You can also register to vote or change your registration information, including your address, via Vote.org.
- Department of Motor Vehicles — Contact your state’s DMV to find their online change of address page (if you’re moving within the same state) or registration information (if you are changing states).
- Toll Pass Agencies — Don’t forget to update your address with whatever toll pass accounts you use. Look at your transponder if you’re not sure what agency handles your toll pass. EZ-Pass, for example, covers twelve states, and services I-PASS in Illinois, and other regional agencies in North Carolina, Indiana, Kentucky, and Florida.
- Unemployment Offices — Depending on your state, relocating while you receive unemployment benefits can be tricky. (If you move to a different state, your benefits will likely end.) Notify your state’s unemployment agency as soon as you being the moving process. In most states, the easiest way to update your address will be to log in to your state’s unemployment benefits online account. If you aren’t sure where to start, the Department of Labor has contact information for all state unemployment insurance offices.
Finally, if you are certified or licensed by your state to fly a plane or maneuver a boat, to fish or hunt, or to perform your profession, be sure to contact that government agency to update your address.
Contact Financial Institutions
Even if you conduct all of your financial transactions online, your providers need to know where you live because some financial rules and regulations are governed by the state in which in the accountholder resides. So, create a checklist for any and all of the following:
- Banks and credit unions where you hold accounts
- Brokerage houses and investment services, for retirement and non-retirement investments
- Credit reporting agencies — Officially, you only need to notify your creditors. However, it’s worth your effort to check Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion after the move to make sure your address has been properly updated. Log in to all three via AnnualCreditReport.com.
Little House Photo by Kostiantyn Li on Unsplash
- Insurance companies — Whether you have auto, homeowners, renters, health, or dental insurance, long-term care or life insurance, umbrella policies, or coverage for your business — if you’ve got insurance, notify them of your address change. In most cases, changing your address will change some aspect of your coverage, especially the cost.
- Lenders — Got credit cards? Auto or personal loans? (Obviously, if you’ve got a mortgage or a HELOC, those will be going away when you move, but the bank will still need to be able to contact you for a while.)
- Online financial accounts — Whether it’s Paypal, CashApp, Venmo, or Zelle, make sure your address is updated in the accounts. Where you reside impacts legal terms and conditions.
Tell the Boss Man (or Boss Lady)
You may not get a physical paycheck anymore, but your employer needs to know where to send tax forms and other official documents.
If you work remotely and change your state of residence, tell your HR department!
Notify Your Utility Companies
When you move, you (generally) don’t take your services with you, but you may keep the same account number. Notify the following when you change your address:
- Electric company
- Gas company
- Sewer service provider
- Trash/Waste/Recycling service providers
- Water company
- Internet service provider
- Telephone companies — You may not have a landline anymore, but you almost certainly have a phone. Be aware that the taxes you pay on cellular phone service are determined by the county in which your account is registered. If you use online billing, it may be to your advantage to keep your cell service registered to your old zip code, but your provider’s Terms and Conditions may not allow this.
- Television service provider — Sure, if you have cable or satellite service, that will change depending on where you move. However, the tax you’re charged for streaming services will change depending on the state to which you move.
- Other entertainment providers — Whether you subscribe to music or gaming services like Spotify or Twitch, or have tangible subscriptions for magazines and newspapers, update your address.
WHO ELSE NEEDS TO KNOW YOU’VE MOVED?
Notifying the above folks will keep you from getting into trouble or debt, but don’t forget all of the other individuals and companies that need to be able to find you.
Household Services
Depending on where you move, your household service providers, whether a big company like Terminex or the nice lady who dusts your piano, will need to know how to contact you, whether to continue providing services or finalize paperwork. Start with these and brainstorm whom else you might need to contact:
- Alarm company
- Housekeepers
- Lawn and garden care
- Pest control
- Pool maintenance
- Snow plowing/shoveling
Healthcare Providers
- Internists/Family practitioners
- Pediatricians
- Specialists (OB/GYNs, ophthalmologists, endocrinologists, etc.)
- Dentists
- Orthodontists
- Veterinarians — If you have a pet with a microchip, update the chip’s registration to reflect your new address so Fido or Fluffy can be safely returned to you!
- Pharmacies, especially online pharmacies
Other Professionals
- Attorney
- Accountant
- Bookkeeper
- Financial advisor
- Personal coaches
- Professional organizer
Schools/Caregivers
- Daycare providers — for childcare, eldercare, or pet care
- School administrative offices — Every school needs your change of address: preschool, elementary, middle, and high schools as well as college, whether you are a student, parent or alumni.
- Tutors — Don’t be so busy with your move that your forget to tell your son’s algebra tutor or your daughter’s piccolo instructor that you moved. It’s no fun to stand at someone’s front door, ringing the bell and having nobody answer.
- Activity administrators — If your kids are in gymnastics or Tae Kwon Do, or you participate in any community organizations, make sure to update your address with them. Yes, the USPS mail forwarding will prompt you to remember this, but the sooner you update this information directly, the less chance there will be to miss something important.
Online Connections
Do you get meals from companies like Blue Apron or Hello Fresh? Make sure your food follows you to your new home.
Do you use food/shopping delivery services like Door Dash or Uber Eats? I’ve seen more than one tweet or TikTok video with someone ordering delivery for the first time in a long time and only realizing after they ordered that the delivery was going to the city where they used to live. (It’s universally agreed that when that happens, you tell the driver to keep the meal and enjoy it!)
Be sure to update your address at Amazon and other retailers where you shop online. Got an Amazon (or other) wish list? Change that address too, or your friends will be upset when they send you birthday presents that you don’t get!
Do you travel? Update your addresses for your hotel, airline and other frequent-user accounts
Tell Your Peeps
You’re not going to forget to give your mom your new address, but remember to update your friends and members of your personal circle, including:
- Extended family and friends — The upside is that you may get sent a housewarming present!
- Civic organizations and clubs to which you belong
- Houses of worship and religious organizations
Business Contacts
I could write an entire post about whom your business should contact regarding a changed address. But for personal mail regarding your professional life, consider:
- Professional associations
- Licensing and certification boards
- Formal networking groups
- Affiliate programs from which you are expecting commissions
All of the above assumes that you’ve moved house in the United States. If you move to another nation, be sure to register your address with the U.S. embassy or consulate in your new country. This will ensure that you receive essential updates about safety, security, and emergencies in your area.
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