I spent years telling people they should record their family’s stories before it’s too late. Most of them nodded politely and said they’d get to it eventually.
Then 2020 happened. And “eventually” stopped being a comfortable word.
Covid changed everything about how people think about family documentation. I watched it happen in real time. The phone started ringing differently. The emails had a different tone. Before the pandemic, people would reach out to Heritage Films and say, “We’ve been thinking about doing something like this for years.” After March 2020, they started saying, “We need to do this now.”
The urgency was palpable. And honestly? It should have been there all along.
Here’s what Covid did. It made the math visible. Your 80-year-old mother is not immortal. Your 75-year-old father who “never gets sick” is, in fact, vulnerable. The grandparents you’ve been meaning to visit, the parents you’ve been meaning to interview, the uncle with all the stories you’ve been meaning to record… suddenly “meaning to” felt like a gamble nobody wanted to take.
I’ve filmed over 700 families. I’ve heard “I wish we’d done this sooner” more times than I can count. Before Covid, that sentence usually meant they wished they’d started while Grandpa was more lucid, or before Aunt Mary passed. After Covid, it meant something rawer. They wished they’d done it before a virus made it terrifying to sit in the same room as the people they loved most.
The pandemic also forced people to get creative. Families started doing Zoom recordings. Phone interviews. Letter exchanges. Some of it was rough and imperfect. All of it was better than nothing. I’d rather have a grainy FaceTime recording of my grandmother telling her immigration story than a perfect silence where that story used to be.
But here’s the thing that worries me. The urgency fades. Vaccines rolled out. Restrictions lifted. And the human tendency to procrastinate crept right back in. We’ll do it next year. There’s no rush.
There is a rush. There was always a rush. Covid didn’t create the urgency. It just ripped the curtain back so everyone could see it.
If the pandemic taught you anything about the fragility of the people you love, don’t let that lesson expire. Heritage Films makes legacy documentary films that preserve your family’s stories permanently. The time to do it is now. It was always now. yourheritagefilm.com