Yes, usually, and often more than families expect.

Dementia is not a uniform erasure. In many people, particularly in the earlier and middle stages of the commonest forms, memories from childhood and early adulthood remain accessible long after this morning has gone. Songs, routes, hands-on skills and the emotional tone of a moment frequently outlast the ability to say what year it is.

That means the material this kind of project wants, which is early life, is often exactly the material still there.

This is general guidance and not clinical advice. Every person is different and the condition changes. If you want to know what is realistic for your own parent, the people who see them regularly, including their clinical team, will know far better than any article. The Alzheimer’s Society publishes practical guidance on communication that is worth reading alongside this.

The rule that matters more than any question

Never test. Not once.

“Do you remember who this is?” and “you know what year that was, don’t you?” are quizzes, and failing a quiz in front of your own child is humiliating. It ends conversations, and it makes the next one harder because the anxiety persists after the memory of the exchange has gone.

Replace every question that checks with a question that offers.

Not “do you remember Auntie Joan?” but “Joan is here in this photograph, in the blue coat.”
Not “what year did you get married?” but “you were married in the spring, weren’t you? Tell me about the day.”
Not “do you know where you are?” but “it is nice and warm in here today.”

You supply the facts. They supply the story. That division of labour is the whole method.

Do not correct

If your father says his mother is coming to visit, and she died in 1974, the answer is not to tell him she died in 1974. He would be hearing it as news, and he would grieve, and then it would happen again next week.

Go with the feeling rather than the fact. “Tell me about your mum.” Almost always, what follows is a real memory, which is what you came for.

This feels dishonest the first few times. It is not. You are choosing which true thing to talk about, not inventing a false one, and the alternative is inflicting a fresh bereavement for the sake of accuracy that helps nobody.

The same applies to dates, sequences and names that come out wrong. Note the correction privately for the written record. Do not deliver it.

Set the conversation up to succeed

Go at their best time of day. For many people this is morning, and many are noticeably harder to reach in the late afternoon and evening. Ask whoever cares for them daily, because they will know precisely.

One person, one room, no television. Competing sound and multiple speakers are much harder to follow than most families realise. A quiet room with one familiar face is worth more than a houseful of relatives.

Sit where they can see your face, at their level, close enough to speak normally.

Do not open with a question at all. Arrive, sit, comment on something in the room. The conversation should start before the subject does.

Keep it short. Twenty or thirty minutes is often the useful window. Two good short visits beat one long one, and a session that runs past the point of tiredness ends badly and colours the next.

The things that open memory when questions do not

Words are not the only door, and often not the best one.

Music from when they were fifteen to twenty-five. This is the most reliable single trigger there is, and the effect is frequently striking. Play it and then say nothing.

Photographs, one at a time. A whole album at once overwhelms. Hand over one picture, name who is in it, and wait.

Objects and textures. A tool, a fabric, a tin, a hairbrush. Something to hold changes the conversation completely.

Smells. Baking, soap, tobacco, a particular polish. Smell reaches memory by a shorter route than almost anything else.

Doing rather than discussing. Peeling potatoes, folding washing, walking. Long-practised physical skills often remain when the ability to describe them has gone, and the talk arrives alongside the hands.

Questions that tend to work

Short, concrete, and about early life. Offer a fact, ask for the picture.

What was your mother’s kitchen like?
Who did you walk to school with?
What did you do on a Saturday when you were young?
What was your first job? What did they have you doing?
What did you wear when you wanted to look smart?
Who made you laugh?
What was the song everyone was playing then?
Was your street noisy or quiet?
What did the house smell like on a Sunday?
Who was the kindest person you knew?
What were you good at?
What did your father do with his hands?

Repeat questions freely across visits. A question that produced nothing in June can produce a great deal in September, and one that worked well is worth asking again, because it will not feel repetitive to them and the answer often gains detail.

What to avoid

Open-ended life questions. “Tell me about your life” is difficult for anybody and impossible here.
Multi-part questions. One idea per sentence.
Chains of why. Why questions ask for reasoning about the past, which is usually the first thing to become hard.
Anything requiring a date, sequence or count.
Correcting, quizzing, or reminding them of a loss.
Speaking about them in the third person while they are present. It is extremely common and it is heard.

Recording, without making it a production

Use audio and put the phone somewhere out of the way. A visible recorder can be unsettling, and a camera pointed at somebody generally changes the room.

Tell them it is recording, in one plain sentence, and let it go. Do not re-explain each time; it introduces anxiety without adding understanding.

What you are capturing is worth more than the information in it. Their voice, their laugh, their turn of phrase, the way they say a name. Families who have this afterwards describe it as the single thing they are most glad of, and it does not depend on the account being accurate or complete.

The practical side is worth ten minutes: how to record on a phone.

Write it down the same day

Memory of a visit fades fast for the visitor too. Write three or four lines that evening: what you asked, what came back, what worked, and what to try next time.

Over a year these notes become the most useful document in the project, because they show you which doors open. They are also, if you do this for long enough, a record of the condition itself, which some families find valuable and others find hard. You can keep them separately.

What good looks like here

Not a life story. Fragments: a name, a street, a joke, half a song, one clear afternoon in 1953.

Fragments are a real record. They are frequently the only version of that afternoon that exists anywhere, and the visit that produced them was worth making regardless of what was said.