The shoebox, in order: what to digitize first.

Every family keeps one. Ours came with the company — our founder's was a steel box with one voicemail in it — and yours is wherever you put it: the closet shelf, the desk drawer, the phone you refuse to trade in because it has the messages on it.

Families ask us where to start. The honest answer is: anywhere, because starting matters more than order. But grief prefers instructions, so here is the order our archivists would choose.

1. The voicemails and the answering-machine tapes

Voice first, always — and ordinary voice above all. "Call me back, it's about the gutters" carries more of a person than any eulogy ever recorded. Export voicemails whole; ship cassettes and microcassettes as they are. Do not transcribe. We need the sound, not the words.

2. The videos where they're off-camera

The camera-shy are loudest just out of frame: narrating the birthday, arguing with the GPS, telling whoever's filming to get the cake in the shot. Some of the truest voice in any archive lives behind the lens.

3. The long, unedited ones

The fourteen-minute video nobody trimmed is worth more than fifty highlights. The pauses live in the boring parts — and the pauses, families tell us, are the person.

4. Letters, journals, and yes, the group chat

Text teaches the turn of mind: how they built a sentence, when they reached for the joke. Export conversations whole, not screenshots of the good parts. Context is fidelity.

5. The odd media

The sermon recordings. The coach's halftime speech someone taped in 1997. The cockpit radio checks. The hold-music complaint your sister saved out of spite. Odd media is often the only place a person was recorded at full volume.

Three worries you can put down

Don't clean the audio. Send the hiss — our archivists prefer the hiss; restoration works best from the untouched original. Don't sort or deduplicate. Seven copies of one video sometimes means seven different endings. Don't fear a format. We have read everything since wire recorders. Your MiniDisc does not scare us.

And if the whole box is nine voicemails and a birthday video — that is a beginning, not a shortage. Enhancement exists for exactly that box. Whatever you have is enough to begin: begin here, or bring the box, unsorted, to any Parlor. Bring it in the shoebox. You would not be the first.