This weekend, my Great Aunt Gertrude passed away. I was fortunate enough to see her several times a year when I was growing up, and saw her even more frequently since I moved to New York.

Gertrude was the kind of woman who you’d bring a box of cookies, yet return home from still holding that box and ladened down with several more.

She was the kind of woman who would visit the Met, look at a Picasso or a Renoir for a few seconds, and, if it didn’t strike her fancy, shrug and say, “it’s nice enough, I guess, but I don’t really care for it.”

And, mostly, she was the kind of woman who told stories. Excellent stories. Especially with her younger sister, my grandmother, the two would regale my brother and I with tales of growing up in New York City, disagreeing with and correcting each other, talking over one another to add commentary and fill in the blanks.

I realized this weekend that, with her death, many of those stories have disappeared. So, this week, in partnership with my father, I’ve stocked up on condenser mics, mixing boards, and the array of other equipment needed for professional quality audio recording.

Armed with it all, I’m setting out to record the stories of my extended family – how they met their spouses and what holidays were like in their homes when they were growing up. Funny things their children did while they were young and bits of wisdom their parents passed along.

As of yet, I don’t have a grand plan for what to do with all of those stories once they’re recorded. At the moment, I’m simply collecting them, trying to lock them down, taking comfort in that permanence achieved in the shift from ephemeral sound waves to preservable backed-up bits.