Whether you have a birthday to celebrate, or another special occasion, gifting memories from friends and family is a powerful way to show support. Gathering memories from a group of people is a large undertaking, however, and in this post we’ll share a few ways to gather such memories.

A few years ago my own grandfather was celebrating his 90th birthday and as a family we decided to gather memories from a group of people, including the many people that he had touched in his military service, church service, as well as friends and family from his long life.

List everyone to include

The first step to gathering memories from a group is to create an initial list of everyone that you want to share a memory or photo in the memory book. An easy way to create this list is to look at mutual friends between you and your loved one on Facebook, use a family directory, or use your own memory of who to gather memories from. Don’t feel pressure to have a complete list.

The first few people are important, but depending on how you choose to invite others to contribute you will have more and more people invited to contribute as time goes on.

How will you invite others to contribute?

Once you have your list of friends and family to contribute to the memory book, you need to decide how to gather memories. With modern technology, there are many free resources, as well as some paid.

Free Survey Software

Online surveys such as Google Forms or Survey Monkey work great as a fast, cheap option to bring content together. It is very easy to set up the survey, and then the responses show up in an electronic spreadsheet that you can download and format. It does take time to format the digital responses into an actual birthday present or gift, but in terms of ease of gathering for cheap this is a good option. One other limitation of this method is that you may not be able to gather photos, however.

Ol’ Fashioned Email

You can also ask friends and family to send you memories via email. This option is very manual, as you need to keep track of each message, but allows for people to send letters of love, with attached photos that you can process and format into a book or slideshow. When you have email as an option, you’ll find some people will mail you letters and photos that you may need to scan into the memory book.

Gratbook

When I needed to gather memories from a group of people for my Grandfather’s 90th birthday memory book, I used Gratbook. This is the easiest way to gather memories from a group and format into a memory book. This solution does cost money, but can save you hours of time spent to gather letters, photos, and designing the gift. There are two options to fund a Gratbook, one where you pay for the book entirely, and another where you can actually invite loved ones who write in the book to help pay as a “crowdfunded” memory book.

Book or Slideshow Design

Once you have the responses gathered from the list of friends and family you decided to include, it’s now time to design. No matter how you gather the responses, there will be some element of design needed to format the book how you want. The free survey option and email option to gather memories from a group will take potentially hours of work copying/pasting and scanning in external entries. While this does let you get very crafty, it is time intensive. Gratbook as a paid option offers a very simple, elegant design that will take less time to curate a book.

No matter what solution you choose, building a memory book for a loved one is a powerful gift and expression of love. It was an exceptional experience building a memory book for my Grandfather’s 90th birthday, gifting him the love of so many in the form of a book with messages and photos. Gathering memories from a group can be difficult, but worth the time as the ultimate gift is very meaningful to the recipient to memorialize a life.