Tips to capture family tales of aging parents or clients in the New Year
Have you lost an aging parent and wished you had asked them more questions about their past, your family history, and your childhood. Have you dabbled in ancestry and realized that you could have just listened closely to the stories your deceased parents told you and maybe written them down. Do not look back! Make this New Year the year you collect the stories in your own family plus assist your aging clients by using 10 reminiscence tools, technology, and techniques.
1. Use empathetic listening. This means to make all the messages you are are giving the older person— tone, how fast you speak, how they are sitting- all saying, “I want to listen to them.”
2. Ask questions that prompt the story but don’t make judgments. If there are going to record the family tale, do it in a way that doesn’t distract or stop the older person from talking.
3. Start somewhere. If the elder isn’t going to tell stories on his or her own, start the story and see if they will follow along.”What was a New Years Resolution that you made and kept” ” Do you remember your favorite doll ” What was your first day of school like”
4. Music is just next to memory in the brain shown by Alive Inside So use Alexa, Spotify, to play 40’s 50’s music or especially the music of the era when they were 
teens Simple ways to spark reminiscence when you visit older family members :
5. Look at old photos together. Photos trigger memory even with dementia. Choose ones from a period of time the person currently remembers, which could be the person as a young adult, teenager, or even a young child.
6.Play music from their teenage years. It is the background to the most emotional period of anyone’s life and deeply lined into memory.
7. Enjoy food they like or food that is a family tradition or specialty, particularly ones that have an element of memory attached from family celebrations. like Mom’s Briscut, Dad’s Sunday Supper lasagna, or “Aunt Helen’s Lemon Cake”.
8. Story Worth was started by Nick Baum, a tecky who was, and in a way, a long-distance care provider for his parents in Sweden. He was curious about their past and invented 
the app based on his own need to gather his family history. My husband is a teller of past tales as a California Highway patrolman, then Hippiedom, then as top marketing director for Pacific Cookie Company, the best cookies here is the west.
Our daughter Kali gave him Story Worth as a holiday gift a year ago. In the past 12 months of the plague, he recorded 40 stories or memories from his past. They are being published by Story Worth Book, 
saving in print the precious reminiscence that would have been lost but now saved in a book that will be given to our adult children and then generations to come.
This is a brilliant way to capture reminiscence and I recommend it to adult children who want to enshrine personal memories in print that otherwise would be lost when they reach back for them..
9. Life Bio- provides an online template of biography and autobiography questions that have been carefully crafted
10. Quick Voice Recorder to catch the memory on your phone
Use reminiscence a part of a whole new domain in aging called quality of life or attending to the older person’s need for joy through activities that stimulate the mind. Reminiscence does that- so find out more about how you can increase the quality of life of older people after the holidays and all year long by building a quality of life reminiscence program like Lifespan’s Well Being program in Santa Cruz, Ca.
higher quality of life for both the older person and the aging family is increased through oral history and reminiscence.
. Equally important, my husband, who has been sheltering in place since March with me, really enjoys writing about his past and the prompts have brought many vivid memories back to him.
Knitting, sewing or other crafts in a quality of life assessment show a past skill. Just touching yarn or fabric can bring back memory A walk in the woods or the beach or bringing them to the client with dementia, with a shell from the shore sand, seaweed or keep, bark from a tree, pine needles, pine cones can 
Reminiscence isn’t new.
4. Music is just next to memory in the brain shown by
Enjoy food like a holiday cookie that is a family tradition or specialty, particularly ones that have an element of memory attached from family celebrations perhaps?
a choir, quiet prayer said together or the touch of bright paper tearing from a gift.