This is what I built out of the gap between those two numbers. A place to record someone while there is still time. A place where those who know them can share their own stories. A place to preserve those stories for yourself and for the generations to come.
I wanted a hundred hours of my father talking. Not a summary of him and not a tribute — his voice, telling the things only he could tell, in whatever order they came to him. We started in August 2024, after his first battle with lymphoma, sitting down with a recorder as often as we could manage.
We got about nine. Nine hours is more than most families have of anyone, and it is nowhere near enough. Everything built and everything planned comes from looking hard at what stood between the nine and the hundred, and deciding that none of it should stand in anyone else’s way.
We had the time. Christmas, Thanksgiving, every long afternoon at the kitchen table. Nothing ever reminded us to press record, and starting was the whole barrier. Most of those conversations were never recorded.
So this does the remembering. A bank of questions, ready when you are, one at a time. A nudge to hit record while you are already sitting there playing Gin, Euchre, or Go Fish. Nothing to set up and nothing to be good at. Silence is allowed.
Nine hours of my father’s voice sat in a folder as sound files, on one disk, under one account. That is how recordings die: not all at once, but by being somewhere nobody can find on the day they matter.
So every story here is kept whole, the recording beside its transcript, and it belongs to the family — to hold, and to hand down. The voice is the point, and it is never traded away for text.
A recording is only worth having if you can find the afternoon you are looking for. Ours was one long file with no way in, and every story in it was as good as lost to whoever came after.
So every spoken story is transcribed word for word and catalogued by who told it and who it mentions. When two people describe the same kitchen, both accounts sit side by side, each under the name of the person who gave it. Nothing is blended into a single official version, because nobody’s memory is the archive.
I can no longer get to a hundred hours. What I have left is the stories of the people who knew him. What I hope for is simple. That the next person who wants a hundred hours gets closer than nine. That everyone who knew someone gets to say what they were there for, and that it is kept exactly as they said it, for the people who come after.
A card at the service and a link in the family’s hands. The brother, the neighbour, the person they hired in 1994 — each tells the afternoon they were there for. From those, the memorial page is woven, each story its own thread.
For a seventieth birthday, a last day of work, or a diagnosis that rearranges a family’s year, the collection happens exactly the same way — and the person is in the room to hear it.
A deck of playing cards with a question on every one, for the hundred hours you can still have with someone. A game at the table becomes the reminder to press record.
This is an early thing. I built it for my father, and his memorial is the first one — one family so far. If it grows, it will be a few families at a time, each set up personally: cards printed, the page made, everything ready before the day.
Tell us who the collection is for and what is happening — a sentence is enough — and we will build the archive around them.
I will try to get back to you, usually within a day. The address is hello@knittt.org, if the button does nothing on your machine.