Advances in digital capture and storage technologies mean that it is now possible to capture and store one’s entire life experiences in personal digital archives. These vast personal archives (or Human Digital Memories (HDMs)) pose new challenges and opportunities for the research community, not the least of which is developing effective means of retrieval from HDMs. Personal archive retrieval research is still in its infancy and there is much scope for novel research. My PhD proposes to develop effective HDM retrieval algorithms by combining rich sources of context associated with items, such as location and people present data, with information obtained by linking HDM items in novel ways.