The household manual only you can write

Start with the water shutoff valve.

Not your memoirs. Not the family tree back to the old country. The valve. Where it is, which way it turns, and the fact that it sticks unless you give it a shove with the heel of your hand. Write that on the first page of a notebook, date it, and you've already done more good than most people manage with a leather-bound journal they never open.

Everything you know about your house, your family, your work and your faith is currently stored in one place, and that place doesn't back itself up. You're not being morbid by admitting that. You're being useful. The people who'll one day stand in your basement with water coming up over their shoes have no way to call you and ask.

Buy one cheap notebook, not a beautiful one

A nice journal makes you hesitate. You'll wait until you have something worthy of the paper, and the waiting becomes the project.

Get a spiral notebook. Or a stack of index cards in a shoebox, which has the advantage that you can add and reorder without starting over. Write in pen, date every entry, and don't fix your handwriting. Your grandchildren will want to see your handwriting more than they'll want tidy margins.

Keep it in the kitchen or wherever you actually sit. A notebook in a drawer upstairs gets used twice.

Twenty minutes is plenty. Most of what's worth writing comes out in short bursts anyway, usually when something reminds you of it. Set the notebook where the reminders happen.

Do the house first, because the house is urgent

The sentimental material can wait a year. The practical material can't, because the moment somebody needs it they'll need it badly and at an inconvenient hour.

Walk the property with the notebook and write down:

• Where the water shutoff, gas shutoff, and main breaker are, and any trick to operating them
• What each circuit breaker actually controls, since the labels in the panel are wrong and you know it
• The septic or well service schedule, who does it, when it was last done
• The age of the roof, the furnace, the water heater, and who installed them
• Which company you call for what, and why you stopped using the other one
• The quirks: the sticky back door, the bathroom fan that runs on the hall switch, the gutter that needs clearing every October or the porch floods

That last category is the whole point. Anybody can look up a furnace model number. Nobody else knows that the upstairs radiator needs bleeding twice a winter and there's a key for it taped inside the linen closet door.

Then make a map, not a filing cabinet

The second section is the administrative map. This is not the same thing as your estate documents, and it must not pretend to be.

A map is a list of what exists and where it lives. The insurance company and policy number. The bank and the branch. The name of your attorney, your accountant, your financial advisor, your doctor. Where the deed is. Where the title to the truck is. Whether there's a safe deposit box, and which bank, and who's on the signature card.

Your will, your power of attorney, and your health care directive are separate legal documents, and they belong with an attorney who practices in your state. A notebook is not a will. If you've been meaning to sort those out and haven't, that phone call is more important than anything else in this article.

Passwords are the modern version of the key under the mat, and they need thinking about. Don't write them all out on page forty of a notebook that sits on the kitchen counter. A password manager with one trusted person holding recovery access is cleaner. A sealed envelope kept with your attorney is the old-fashioned version and still works. What doesn't work is dying with a phone nobody can unlock and a photo library nobody can reach.

Name the people in the photographs

Go get the shoebox. You know the one.

Sit down with a soft pencil or an archival pen and write on the back of each photo: who, roughly when, roughly where. You'll get some of it wrong. Write it anyway, with a question mark where you're unsure. A guess with a question mark is infinitely more use than a face nobody can name.

This is the job that only you can do, and the window closes fast. Once your generation stops being able to identify the man in the hat, he's gone twice.

If there are hundreds of photos, don't try to do them all. Pull the fifty that matter and label those. Fifty labeled photographs beat four hundred anonymous ones.

Record the stories out loud

Some things don't come out in writing. Ask most men to write about their father and they'll produce three stiff paragraphs. Ask them about their father while the recorder's running and you'll get an hour.

Have a grandchild sit across from you with a phone recording. Give them questions in advance so they're not fishing: What was the house you grew up in like? What did your mother cook? How did you and Grandma meet, and what did you think the first time you saw her? What did you do in the war, or in the mill, or on the road? What's the worst mistake you made with money, and what did it teach you? What do you believe, and when did you start believing it?

Thirty or forty minutes per session. More than that and everyone gets tired and the good material dries up.

Then — and this is where these projects usually die — get the file off the phone. Put it somewhere with a name that means something. "Grandpa Dale on his father, March 2024" survives a change of devices. "IMG_4471" doesn't.

Write the instructions for the things you're good at

If you sharpen your own chisels, write down the grit sequence and the angle you use. If you can take a hog apart, sketch it. If you've been making the same bread for forty years, write the recipe out including the parts that aren't in any cookbook: the way the dough should feel, how long you let it go in a cold kitchen versus a warm one.

Trade knowledge, too. How you bid a job. What you learned about hiring. The customer you should have walked away from and how you knew.

And write the short piece about what you believe. A page in your own words about your faith, what carried you through the hard stretch, what you'd want said at your funeral. Your family may never ask for it directly. They will read it.

Tell somebody where it is

A perfect record nobody can find is the same as no record.

Tell two people, not one. Put a copy of the house section in a second place. If it's digital, make sure at least one other person can actually open it, and check that once a year on a date you'll remember. Your birthday works.

One November your son-in-law will be standing in your basement at eleven at night with a flashlight and a pipe letting go behind the water heater. He'll open a drawer, find a notebook, and the first page will tell him exactly where the valve is and that it sticks.

He'll never forget that you thought of him.