StoryCorps vs Tell Mel: Which One Should You Use to Record a Parent's Life Story?

If you have been searching for a way to record an aging parent's or grandparent's life story, you have almost certainly run into StoryCorps. It is one of the best-known oral history projects in the United States, and it is free. So it is worth saying plainly up front: StoryCorps is a genuinely wonderful thing, and for some families it is the right answer.

StoryCorps and Tell Mel are not really competitors. They solve different problems. StoryCorps preserves a conversation. Tell Mel builds a memoir over time. Understanding that difference is the fastest way to work out which one your family actually needs, and quite a few families end up doing both.

What StoryCorps is

StoryCorps is an American nonprofit founded in 2003 by radio producer David Isay. It has recorded interviews with more than 645,000 participants across all 50 states, and it is probably familiar to you from the segments that air on NPR's Morning Edition.

The format is specific and deliberate. Two people who know and care about each other sit down together for a recording session of about 40 minutes, guided by a trained StoryCorps facilitator. With the participants' permission, the recording is archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, which is a remarkable thing to be able to say about a recording of your grandmother.

The StoryCorps app and the do-it-yourself option are free. For facilitated recording sessions, StoryCorps asks for a $50 donation to help offset costs, and participants receive a copy of their recording.

What Tell Mel is

Tell Mel is a memoir and oral history service for aging parents and grandparents. An interviewer named Mel telephones your mother, father, grandmother or grandfather on a regular schedule and has a real conversation with them, asking follow-up questions as the story goes. A landline is fine. There is no app to install and no account for them to log into.

After each call, the conversation is ghostwritten into an edited memoir chapter in their own voice, with the original audio kept alongside the writing. The chapters collect into a private Living Memoir website your family can read, listen to and share, and it keeps growing for as long as the conversations continue. Mel interviews in 10 languages and calls parents in 26 countries.

The honest comparison

When StoryCorps is the better choice

You want the recording preserved publicly and permanently. Being archived at the Library of Congress is something no commercial service can offer. If the point is that your family's story becomes part of the national record, StoryCorps is the answer and nothing else comes close.

Budget is the binding constraint. It is free. If money is the thing standing between you and having any recording at all, do not let a paid service talk you out of a free one.

You want to be in the room. The StoryCorps format is two people who care about each other talking, and that relationship is the point. There is something in a recording of you and your father talking that a third-party interview does not replicate.

One conversation is what you are after. If you want a single meaningful recording rather than an ongoing project, StoryCorps is built for exactly that.

When Tell Mel is the better choice

You want the stories written down, not just recorded. A 40-minute audio file is a treasure, but it is not something the grandchildren are likely to sit and listen to. Written chapters get read, shared and reread, and Tell Mel keeps the audio too, so you are not choosing between them.

One session will not cover it. Most people's lives do not fit in 40 minutes. If you want childhood, the war years, how your parents met, the move, the business, the regrets, that is many conversations, and it needs something built to run over months.

Your parent speaks another language. Mel interviews in English, Spanish, French, German, Hindi, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, Italian and Dutch, and can deliver chapters in both their language and English, which matters when the grandchildren read only one of the two.

You are racing a diagnosis. Families often start after a diagnosis of dementia or memory loss. Mel is patient, never corrects, and is happy to hear the same story more than once, which is frequently how the richest details surface. Long-term memory often stays vivid well after short-term memory fades.

Getting them to open up is the problem. Some parents deflect when their own child asks. A warm interviewer who is simply curious, and who is not their kid, often gets further.

Doing both

These are not mutually exclusive, and the combination is genuinely good. Record a StoryCorps session for the conversation between the two of you and the permanence of the Library of Congress archive. Run Tell Mel alongside it for the breadth, the writing and the languages. One gives you a moment; the other gives you the whole life.

The short version

Choose StoryCorps if you want a free, facilitated, permanently archived recording of a conversation between you and someone you love, and you can be in the same room.

Choose Tell Mel if you want an ongoing memoir written down over months, your parent lives far away, they speak another language, or you are working against memory loss.

Either way, the mistake is waiting. The stories you mean to ask about are the ones that go first.

StoryCorps details in this article were taken from publicly available descriptions of the organization and its programs in August 2026. StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit and is not affiliated with Tell Mel. Check storycorps.org for current session formats and suggested donations.