The Harvard Qajar Project aims to fill a void of resources on women of the Qajar era by developing a comprehensive digital resource that preserves, links, and renders accessible primary-source materials related to the social and cultural history of women’s worlds in Qajar Iran. The project is based on the fundamental recognition that the vast majority of the resources it aims to collect are not available in collections in publicly accessible institutions, but rather will come from private collections and from individual contributions by persons connected in one way or another to the Qajar era, be they members of the larger Qajar clan (princely families, families with Qajar connections, or direct descendants of the Imperial line), to members of clerical or merchant families, to Iranian and non-Iranian individuals at large with interest in the Qajar era. The project aims to digitize personal recollections (oral history), private photographs and papers, records of births, deaths, marriages, divorces, and commercial deeds, which contain potentially valuable information on the lives of women at all levels of society. Given the fact that these documents and the individuals with personal memories are distributed over a geographically dispersed network of individuals and families, digitization in order to create an accessible archive for researchers seemed the most feasible approach to gathering and preserving this history. Given also the personal and familial value many of these documents represent to the individuals and families that currently possess them, digitization enables the project to overcome the reluctance of owners to part with their documents or collections and thus helps make accessible to an academic community at large what otherwise would at best be available only to a very few scholars and individuals who had knowledge of the existence of individuals with personal memories or the existence of these documents. This paper will particularly highlight one of the methods of gathering documents for the digitization project: interviews with individuals with personal recollections of the period under study.