“The skills that matter most here were not learned in a boardroom.”
I am Amanda Yaffe-Parker, and Capture & Keep is mine. It is not a company with staff; it is me, a recorder and a lot of hours at a desk.
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. I am not a clinician and I do not present myself as one, the Samaritans training taught me how to listen, not how to diagnose or treat.
Those years of befriending are really where this came from. I sat with people who had eighty or ninety years behind them and had not been asked about any of it, and who lit up when somebody finally did. That is the whole of it: nobody had ever asked. It is also why the writing on this site leans where it does, towards conversations with older relatives, memories that arrive out of order, and the stories sitting behind a family tree.
As a busy mum myself, I know how precious family time is, and how daunting a project like this can feel. So my promise is simple: a professionally managed process, and a genuinely warm, patient pair of hands for the person who matters most.
- Samaritans trained listener
- Volunteer befriender to older people
- 15 years managing projects in UK agencies
I conduct every conversation, and I write every story, myself.
Nothing is handed off to a junior writer, a template, or an outsourced service. When you book a conversation with me, it is genuinely me who turns up, on the phone, on video, or in person, and it is genuinely me who sits with the recording afterwards and writes it into something worth keeping.
I use the same care whatever the size of the project: a single conversation gets exactly the same attention as a full Life Story.
Colchester, working across Essex and Suffolk, and further by arrangement.
Most conversations happen in person, in the other person's own home and their own chair, that matters more than it sounds. Where getting to somebody is difficult, we work something out between us rather than rule it out. Tell me where the person is.
Most of what I know is on here, free.
I could keep the method to myself. I would rather not, for two reasons.
The first is that plenty of families can do this perfectly well themselves, and the thing that stops them is not skill, it is not knowing what to ask or what to do with the recording afterwards. That is a solvable problem and it does not need me. The questions and the guides are the real ones, not a taster.
The second is that anybody thinking of asking me to do it should be able to see exactly what the work involves first. If you read the guides and decide you would rather hand it over, at least you know what you are handing over.
It is a small business. It is me, a recorder and a lot of hours at a desk, plus everything on this site that I have written down so somebody else can use it.