Every one of these is still in one person’s head.
Not one of them has been written down.
From £250 · nothing happens until you are sure
Every story is worth keeping, before it is lost.
Nobody remembers a whole life in one afternoon. Amanda knows what to ask, leaves room for the things that come back a week later, and writes it all into a life story that still sounds like them.
Capture & Keep is a UK life-story service and a practical resource, run by Amanda Yaffe-Parker. She is based in Colchester in Essex and works with people and families across the UK.
“Nearly every person I speak to begins by telling me that there is nothing to tell. Not one of them has been right yet.”
Amanda
A life is not a date. It is a list of places.
Ask somebody where they have lived and you get a list. Ask them what happened there and you get the story. That second question is the whole job, and it is the one families run out of time to ask.
Illustrative life · design demonstration
- 1938SalfordBorn, two streets from the docks
- 1940RhylEvacuated, and hated every minute of it
- 1956CatterickNational service, first time away from home
- 1959GlasgowA dance, and the reason for everything after
- 1961CoventryThe job that lasted thirty-eight years
- 1974FelixstoweThe same fortnight, every single summer
- 2009ColchesterNear the grandchildren, finally
A design demonstration, not a real client. Every place, year and line above is invented to show what the device does. On a live page these would either be a family’s own, with their permission, or stay openly illustrative exactly as they are here. The route is not a coverage map: it says nothing about where Amanda travels.
Memories don't arrive in order.
They arrive sideways: a smell, a street, a name you had not thought of in forty years. Half of what ends up in a life story is something that came back a week after the conversation, which is exactly why one afternoon is never enough.
A place is the easiest way in. Not “tell me about your childhood”, but one building, and one question about it.
Which room did everybody actually sit in, and which one was kept for best?
Who did they sit next to, and what happened to them?
What did the first morning there sound like?
What shops were on it, and which one did they go into every week?
Where did they go, how often, and who was waiting at the other end?
Which days brought everybody into one building?
The drawings are generic building types, never a real address, so none of them can read as somebody’s actual house. The questions are examples of the shape a good question takes. The real ones, a hundred of them, are free on the site.
Some of it is already there.
Amanda also works from what a family already has: the recordings, photographs, letters and half-finished journals sitting in drawers.
Most families are further along than they think. The box nobody has opened since the funeral, the tape somebody made in 1998, the journal that stops in March. None of it is a story yet. All of it is evidence.
Usually undated, usually unlabelled, and usually the fastest way to start somebody talking.
Not for what they say. For the names in them, and who wrote to whom, and when it stopped.
A voice on a tape is worth a chapter of description, and nobody ever regrets keeping one.
Somebody already started. Finishing it is a different job from beginning one.
Those cards are deliberately abstract. Nothing on this page is a scan, a document, a clipping or a photograph of anybody’s real material, and nothing has been made to look like one. Genuine family material belongs here only when a family has given permission for it, and that is a future asset, not a design device.
Amanda joins it together.
Not just interviewing. Guiding, listening, organising, and then writing.
I have spent fifteen years in some of the UK’s top advertising and marketing agencies, managing projects for big corporate clients. But the thing I have been most passionate about throughout my career has always been the same: people’s stories, and how to tell them well.
I studied psychology early on and later trained in therapy, and that fascination with what makes people who they are led me to train as a Samaritans listener. I spent years as a voluntary befriender to elderly men and women, many of whose stories have stayed with me ever since.
Samaritans trained listener · 15 years managing projects
- 01 We talkA series of relaxed, recorded conversations, at their pace and in their own chair. Nothing has to be ready in advance, and the things that come back a week later go in too.
- 02 Amanda writesShe shapes those conversations into a properly written life story, keeping the person’s own voice throughout. You see a full draft first.
- 03 Your book is madeThe finished story becomes exactly what you want to keep: a professionally produced hardback, the original recordings, or a digital copy.
Then it stops being fragments.
A place, a year, a photograph, a question and something somebody remembered a week late. Scroll, and watch them become the thing the family actually keeps.
I started on the factory floor at sixteen, sweeping metal shavings for four pounds a week, and thirty-eight years later they gave me a clock and a cup of tea in the same building. In between there was a wife, three children, a strike I still have opinions about, and more good men than bad ones. Nobody had ever asked me to say any of that out loud before, let alone write it down.
A sample passage, written to show the standard. Not a real client, and it says so on the live site too. Life is messy; the finished story is not. That is the whole product, and it is the one thing a page of description cannot demonstrate.
Not a printout in a ring binder.
Something that sits on a shelf for fifty years and gets handed down.
- BindingCloth bound hardback, foil blocked title
- SizeA5 portrait, around ninety pages
- PaperHeavyweight uncoated cream, matte finish
- PhotographsYours, restored where needed and woven through
- CopiesAgreed with Amanda: a hardback, a digital copy, the edited recordings, or some combination
Start yours.
No hourly rates, and nothing added later.
The Memory Kit
Answer a set of questions together, in your own time, then send the recording to Amanda. Decide about the write-up whenever you are ready.
The Life Story
Amanda conducts every conversation herself, from the first call to the finished book, in their own voice. Depends on the number of sessions, worked out together on a call.
Bespoke
For a project that needs something beyond the usual shape.
Let’s keep their story, together.
Tell Amanda a little about who the story is for. There is no obligation, no pressure, and no salesperson at the end of it. Only her.
WhatsApp 07843 171332 · if time is short, message her