Fast forward to 2025 and we host 8 podcasts as well as channels on You Tube, TikTok, X and Instagram, packed with fabulous moments and tales from the past as told to us by visitors to The Wee Museum in Ocean Terminal, volunteers and members of staff. Many of the people who have shared their memories have now left us, making their storytelling voices even more precious

When I arrived at The Wee Museum of Memory our archives were held mainly on cassette tape, boxes and boxes of interviews, memories and reminiscence group footage tucked away on c90 tapes. Our challenge at this point was to start gathering new stories on more high tech hand held recorders (rather than the classic ‘record and play’ tape recorder better suited to the top 40!) whilst also transferring this vast treasure trove of snippets from the past into an online format that people could access.

Our first foray into this world was a themed show informally called The THELMA Tapes, initially gathering together snippets of life in old Leith then moving on to episodes centred around such topics as childhood memories, WW2, music, ‘make do and mend’ and much loved and lost family pets. This continues to this day, with our most recent show a celebration of 125 years of Glenogle Baths, which can be found easily by searching for The Living Memory Association podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or You Tube.

Since then we have expanded our podcast portfolio, digitising much of our cassette archive whilst gathering new memories of the past, all of which can be found on the ‘podcasts’ tab of our website at www.livingmemory.co.uk

The next big change in our memory gathering came in February 2021. Until this point our focus had been on audio. 

Understandably people in general are a lot more willing to leave their reminiscences with us in audio format rather than agreeing to be filmed. What we did find though was that every now and then we would have a volunteer, a member of staff or a visitor to our Museum or our reminiscence groups who was more than happy to be filmed, and excited to embrace low level local celebrity fame on TikTok!

In its early days TikTok had been a platform full of teenagers lip syncing to their favourite songs, but as it grew, niche groups such as BookTok popped up, catering for users with specific interests. Given that our stars were a little bit older than your average TikTok video maker, we found our own heritage niche, telling and preserving stories from a distant past that a lot of the Tiktok audience knew nothing about.

Our biggest hit video so far from volunteer Stuart McIvor has just hit 120,000 views and an honourable mention must to the recently departed Newhaven legend Sophia Abrahamsen who regularly had thousands of people tuning in to her amazing stories. In time, an older audience have appeared on the platform and have shared their memories in the comments under our videos, bringing an additional layer to it all.

Having created these videos within TikTok, we were able to download them and share them to our Living Memory Association Facebook page, which now has nearly 7,000 followers, and to hugely popular Facebook reminiscence pages such as Lost Edinburgh, Spirit of Leithers, Edinburgh Nostalgia and Edinburgh Past and Present. With this large audience, our videos (particularly our new ‘pub memories’ thread) have been viewed over 20,000 times and brought back a multitude of stories from Facebook users across the world on a variety of topics.

We continue to gather audio memories for our podcasts in our studio at the new ‘Resourcing Reminiscence’ Wee Museum exhibition space at Ocean Terminal and we welcome new visitors and new (old) memories to the main Wee Museum of Memory on the 1st floor and our ‘Away for the Messages’ unit on the ground floor. So please pop in to see us soon at Ocean Terminal, we are happy to record full life stories on audio and shorter stories on our video channels if you would like to become our next social media superstar!

TikTok: @livingmemoryassociation)
YouTube: Living Memory Association
Facebook: Living Memory Association
Edinburgh X: @ThelmaScotland
Instagram: @thelmascotland