How to remember more of your life, from childhood on

To jog your memory, start with something specific: a room, a song, a smell, a report card, a question from your sister. Trying to remember "my childhood" or "the 1960s" all at once usually leads to a blank page.

Try one or two of the techniques below at a time. Write down whatever comes back, even if it's only a few words. You can turn it into a story later.

Draw the house you grew up in

Draw a floor plan of your childhood home, then walk through it in your mind, room by room. Don't worry about scale or neatness.

Fill in what was where: the kitchen table, the radio, the bed you shared with your brother, the spot where the dog slept. Then go slowly and ask yourself, in each room:

• What did you do in this room?
• Where did everyone sit at dinner?
• What was in the kitchen drawers and under the sink?
• What could you hear from your bed at night?
• Which room were you not allowed in, and why?

Do the same for your grandparents' house, your school, your first apartment, or the place you worked longest.

Use objects, smells, sounds and food

Make a list of things you saw or used every day, then write down what each one brings back.

Start with the family car (make, model and color), the TV or radio, your father's tools, your mother's purse, a coat you loved, a toy. For each one, note who used it, where it was kept and what became of it.

Then try your senses. Cook a dish your mother made, from her recipe card if you still have it. Think about how your school, the barbershop or your grandmother's house smelled. Think about sounds: a train at night, the screen door, the ice cream truck, your father's car pulling into the driveway.

Look up the music and news of one year

Pick a year, such as the year you turned 16, and look up what was on the radio and in the news. Then ask yourself where you were, and who you were with, when you heard it.

For music, Wikipedia has Billboard's year-end list of top singles for every year back to 1946. Search for "Billboard year-end" and the year. In 1972, for example, the top song was Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." Play a few songs from your year and write down whatever comes to mind.

For news, search Wikipedia for the year and the country, such as 1972 in the United States, which lists events month by month. For local news, ask your public library about old newspapers from your town.

Go through photos and old papers

Photos and old papers give you names, dates and places. Looking at them closely often brings back the rest of the story.

With a photo, look past the faces. Look at the car in the driveway, the wallpaper, the clothes, the food on the table. Ask who took the picture, what happened just before and what happened after. There's more on this in our guide to old family photos.

Papers worth digging out:

• Report cards and school yearbooks
• Letters and postcards
• Recipe cards, especially in someone's handwriting
• Pay stubs, job letters and military papers
• Old calendars, address books and Christmas card lists
• Wedding invitations, church bulletins and funeral cards

An old address book can tell you who your friends were that year and where they lived.

Find your old addresses on a map

Look up the places you lived on a map and walk the streets on screen. Seeing where the school, the store and the bus stop were can bring back the routes you took every day.

In Google Maps, type in the address and switch to Street View to see the street as if you were standing in it. On some streets, a "See more dates" option shows older Street View photos of the same spot, going back as far as 2007 in some places (here's how). Even if the house has changed, you can retrace the walk to school.

If you were born before 1950, or want to see where your parents or grandparents lived that year, the 1950 US census is free to search by name online. According to the National Archives, it lists each household's street and house number, everyone living there and how they were related to the head of the household, their ages, and the work of everyone 14 or older. The name index was made by a computer reading the handwriting, so try a few spellings.

Build a timeline with anchor events

Write the years from your birth to today down the left side of a few sheets of paper, one line per year. Fill in the things you're sure of first. Those anchors help you place everything else.

Good anchors are where you lived, which school or grade you were in, your jobs, the cars you drove, weddings, births, deaths, moves, and news you remember hearing.

Then use them to place other memories: "That must have been 1963, because we were still in the Elm Street house and I was in sixth grade." You don't need every year filled in.

Talk with the people who were there

Call a brother, sister, cousin or old friend and ask about one particular thing. Hearing their version can bring back parts of yours.

Ask small, specific questions rather than "What do you remember about growing up?" For example:

• "What do you remember about the kitchen on Elm Street?"
• "What was the name of the man who ran the corner store?"
• "Do you remember the summer the river flooded?"

They'll remember some things differently. You can write your version, mention theirs, or include both.

Ask yourself what happened next

When a memory comes back, follow it by asking what happened next, and then what happened after that.

Getting lost at the state fair can lead to who found you, what your father said in the car, and why you never went back. Ask what happened just before, too, and who else was there.

Give it a few days, and keep a notebook handy

Memories often come back hours or days after you start looking for them, while you're driving, cooking or falling asleep. Keep a small notebook or your phone's voice memo app nearby so you can catch them.

Write a few words, not a whole story: "Uncle Walt's boat, the cooler, the storm." You can come back to it later.

You don't need exact dates

It's normal not to remember dates, and everyone's memory is imperfect. Write what you remember and mark your guesses as guesses.

You can write "I think it was the summer of 1958" or "sometime in the early '60s." If a date matters, check it against a document, the back of a photo, or someone who was there. If it doesn't matter, leave it as a guess and keep going.

Let someone ask you the questions

If a blank page doesn't work for you, answer questions instead. Ask a grandchild to interview you with a list of life story questions, and record it on a phone.

Or use Biographer, an AI interviewer and writer you talk with in your web browser. It asks follow-up questions about what you just said, and it remembers what you told it in earlier conversations, so it can come back to your grandfather's farm or the house on Elm Street another day. When you're ready, it writes the story from your conversation.

Once the memories start coming, here's how to write your life story one story at a time.