20 Clever Ways Families Kept Records Before Computers

Around 1940, International Mutoscope Corporation produced the Voice-O-Graph, a coin-operated recording booth that was available for use in train stations and arcades. Insert 25 or 35 cents, and your voice would be recorded onto a small 78 rpm record. The recording time was about 65 seconds. During World War II, families mailed Voice-O-Graph recordings home with greetings and goodbyes, and even the sounds of babies.

The Lakota, Kiowa, and a number of other Plains nations made winter counts, or waniyetu wowapi, pictographic calendars painted on buffalo hides or canvas. Each year, the winter count keeper and the elders of his band selected one particularly memorable event and painted a single picture to represent it. This wasn’t a census of births and deaths; rather, it was a mnemonic device, or memory aid, for oral tradition.

The Worcester, Mass., printer Isaiah Thomas published the first American Bible with blank pages for recording births, marriages, and deaths in 1791. Before states began mandating that all births and deaths be registered, families could present proof of birth, marriage, or age by citing a family Bible flyleaf entry on one of these blank pages as a secondary source, if they could establish ownership of the Bible. There was no requirement to keep such a record. Families just kept Bibles, and it was fine.

A typical piece of hair jewelry might be a locket with hair woven under glass and encased in engraved gold or silver. These were fairly common in the 18th and 19th centuries because hair doesn’t decay and makes for a lasting memento. It was customary for soldiers, brides, and lovers to exchange hair with one another long before either had died. Queen Victoria’s jewelry made from Prince Albert’s dark hair became famous after he died in 1861. But these lockets had been in use long before Victoria.

As late as the early 1900s, rural households that might be illiterate would carve notches marking a small debt into a hazel or willow stick for things like a milk delivery. The stick was then divided into two halves, known as the stock and the foil, which had to be matched before the debt could be considered valid. This was a household habit, nothing like Britain’s much larger government-run Exchequer tally system, which was burned in an 1834 fire.

Sometime between 1740 and 1900, German-speaking families living in Pennsylvania and the neighboring states paid for illuminated birth and baptismal certificates known as Taufscheine (or Fraktur certificates), written in an elaborate script. The certificates record when a baby was born, the maiden name of the mother, and the names of the child’s baptism sponsors. The certificates were not typically hung up on the wall, but rather were stored in Bibles or flat in wooden boxes, which protected the pigments and preserved the family’s privacy.

Clan lineage registers known as jiapu or zupu became more widespread among common families during the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE) after originally being used only by elite families in the imperial court. Printed or handwritten volumes were maintained by clan committees and revised approximately every thirty years to include information about family genealogy, location of graves, and generation poems, which helped identify a person’s place in the family line. Wives were often represented by their surname alone, while details regarding female descendants were rarely included.

Birth spoons were silver spoons engraved with the child’s name, as well as his or her birthday, time of birth, and weight, turning the spoon into a lasting keepsake. Moreover, since the spoons were made out of silver, which had actual monetary value, they were a type of investment or savings account for working- and middle-class families (one that was possible to sell off in dire financial straits).

The invention of cheap, mass-produced cotton and the introduction of India ink, a permanent, indelible blue-black ink, made signature and album quilts a practical form of decoration in 1840s antebellum America. The fabric pieces were individually signed by family and friends in ink or embroidery thread for weddings, significant birthdays, or when relatives headed out west. Once sewn together, these fabric pieces provided a visual record of those who made up the family’s social world.

The Korean clan lineage books (jokbo) track patrilineal descent (family lines traced through fathers), official ranks achieved, and places of interment, from generation to generation. The oldest extant printed jokbo is the Andong Gwon-ssi Sebo from 1476. Earlier records included descendants from maternal lines and daughters, but after Neo-Confucian reforms in the 17th century, a philosophical and social movement that promoted greater societal order and hierarchy, later records commonly included only male descendants, while females were often named only by their husband’s surname.

Tin or iron deed chests were used to protect family records, property deeds, wills, apprenticeship agreements, and other irreplaceable documents from fires and vermin. For free Black families in the decades before the Civil War, freedom certificates in these boxes were their legal evidence that they were not enslaved. Without the box, they could lose the evidence.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, schoolgirls in Britain and North America embroidered “Family Register” samplers on linen or canvas, with their relatives’ names and birth and death dates embroidered around a decorative tree. This was a good way for a girl to develop her needlework skills while creating a lasting household record that might be framed and displayed or kept folded away for safekeeping.

The pocket almanacs, annual publications containing calendars, as well as weather and planting information, were also used as diaries. Printed editions of these booklets often had extra pages left blank, waiting for the owner’s handwriting. In those blank spaces, individuals would write down their weather observations, chores, and important dates and events like births and illnesses, alongside the pre-printed calendar. The purchased almanac turned into a personal journal over time.

Families often tied their letters together with ribbon or string, and held on to them for decades, sometimes even generations. These letters, written by hand in the language of the sender, conveyed news about family members, moves, romances, and deaths, providing a wealth of information not found in more structured records such as Bibles or accounting books.

A woman may also have had a handwritten receipt book (what we’d now call a recipe book) that included not only recipes but also herbal and domestic medicine remedies. Often, she would add family birth and death dates in the margins or on a blank end page of her recipe book.

Farmers’ account books recorded crop harvests, household credit, and prices of goods, allowing the family’s economic life to remain in order. In addition, the wide margins of the account book provided space for recording events like births, deaths, weather conditions, and medicine taken. Family account books differed from the ledger books used by merchants for their business dealings.

Baby albums, which had been created toward the end of the 19th century, were being mass-published more widely in the 1910s and 1920s, with preprinted pages to record the baby’s birth weight and sections to record when teeth erupted, when vaccinations were given, and even places to keep locks of hair. There was also room for recording the baby’s first words or first steps. Baby books were not something that parents made up from scratch.

In the 1800s, many lithographers and printers who produced images using a printing process called lithography produced large “Family Record” sheets with blank heraldic shields that could be filled in by the family using calligraphic ink. The most famous of these was New York’s Currier & Ives, whose Family Records would be proudly displayed in the parlor for guests to view. Some wealthier families simply skipped straight to purchasing a hand-painted ancestor table.

Following the invention of daguerreotype photography in 1839, and the proliferation of small photographic calling cards (cartes-de-visite) in the 1850s, many families began collecting photographs in bound albums. However, only with a written caption indicating who, when, and where could a photograph be useful to future generations. A picture without a caption would quickly become a stranger.

Slate, marble, or granite headstones were made to stand in graveyards, marking people’s births and deaths in perpetuity, usually laid out in family plots where they could be read for centuries. Carved dates were not necessarily accurate, as there might be delays between someone’s passing and the placement of a headstone; a mason might misinterpret a date, or a relative might forget. But stone could endure in ways that paper, cloth, or metal could not.

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