Guides

How to preserve your family’s history and memories, in one place

Keep three things together: the records that prove the dates, the photographs and documents, and what your relatives remember. Keep each beside the person it is about. Most families have all three, but in different places. A family history lasts when they are joined and kept where the whole family can reach them.

Why it ends up in pieces

Each part of a family’s history has its own home. Census returns and certificates are on records sites, which are built for searching, not for keeping a family’s stories. Photographs are in albums, shoeboxes and phones, most of them without a name on the back. Recordings of a grandparent’s voice sit in a folder nobody opens. And the stories themselves, such as who was at the wedding or why the family left Cork, are kept only by the people who remember them.

The records and the photographs can wait. The stories cannot. When a relative dies, what they knew goes with them unless someone has asked.

What to gather first

1. The people. A name for everyone you know of, with a year of birth if you have one. A year is enough to begin.
2. What your relatives remember. Ask the oldest first. A short conversation now is worth more than a long one planned for later.
3. The photographs and documents you already hold: certificates, letters, the family Bible, a funeral card. Our guide to old family photos says how to name and store them.
4. The records that prove the dates and places: census returns, births, marriages and deaths.

Keep each piece beside the person it is about

A memory is most useful next to the person it describes. “Grandad worked on the docks before the war” belongs on his page, beside the census that lists him as a labourer in Liverpool. A photograph belongs with the people in it. When everything is kept by person, anyone in the family can open one name and find it all.

Say how sure each fact is. A date from a certificate is proven. A date worked out from a census age is probable. A story told at the kitchen table is remembered. All three are worth keeping, as long as you know which is which.

Keep it private, and keep it shared

A family’s history includes living people, and some of it is not for strangers. Keep it somewhere private to the family, where each living person decides what the rest can see of them. And keep it somewhere the whole family can add to, so it does not depend on one person’s computer.

Keep a copy of your own, too. Whatever you use, make sure you can take everything out of it, photographs included, in a form other programs can read.

Keeping it together on Heirstory

Heirstory is a private record that holds a family’s history in one place. Gene, an AI genealogist, finds your family in the public records and asks each relative about the people they knew.

• Everything on the person’s page: records, photographs, documents and memories, each beside the person it concerns.
• Every fact with its source, marked proven, probable or remembered.
• Shared, but private. Nothing is public. Near family see each other in full, and everyone else sees what each person chooses.
• Room for the papers. Each family stores 1 GB of photographs and documents free.
• A copy whenever you want one. Anyone can download everything they may see, with the photographs and documents. If Heirstory ever stops running, members will be told at least 60 days before.
• Free to keep. Keeping what your family has gathered costs nothing. Only Gene’s work uses credits, and everyone starts with 100.

Questions

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