I agree, we should record our past lives. As contributors have stated, the importance is made obvious by wishing our parents had done so but beware. I did write an autobiography, made a bit more interesting by spanning WW2 as a child. Fortunately I had an old aunt with a needle-like memory. She stayed with us for a fortnight and I recorded details of an era covering my pre war life and her true facts did not match my romantic memories. I had to alter everything. This just proves that History is just His Story.
“Yes, Yvonne, I'll definitely include photos. Incidentally, why should scanning them be a challenge theses days? You could also photo them, couldn't you?” I actually didn’t mean to scan the photos (like with a printer/scanner), @Thomas Stearn . What I am doing is taking a picture with my iPhone, but I am using a photo-scanning program to do that. I had one that I was using before, but they stopped making that particular app, so now I have installed the Google PhotoScan app, and I am going to use that. When you use a scanning app, it seems to produce better results than just using the camera and taking a picture of the old photo gives you.
A few years ago I started by making a list of all the bases I was stationed at, then all the TDY's ( deployments ) and then I went back and described the work I did. Fun to remember places and 'brothers' I worked along side. Wanted my boys to have something in case they ever wonder what it was like to load bombs during Vietnam and then serving during Desert Storm and how they were different, yet the same... I know with my dad, having served in WWII as a Marine and then in the U.S. Navy, for a total of 36 years, he'd been a lot of places, done a lot of things and served on a lot of Ships. Due to his dementia toward the end, I missed out on so many of his exploits. ( And something like a footnote, I mention what songs/artist I was listening to during each phase of my past life. Give the boys a reason why "Dad sure listens to some 'strange' music!")