Built For Families Who Keep Their Own Record
We built one private place for a family spread across cities and time zones, and for the material a family holds that exists nowhere else.
A family's life is currently kept in three places at once. The photographs are in Google Photos, the conversation is in a WhatsApp group, and the voice notes are somewhere in that group above thirty other messages. Each of those was built to do a different job well, and keeping one family's record together is not that job.
So we made one place for it: the photographs and the moments, the messages, the voice notes, the tree of who everyone is, and the days your family plans around. One family holds it, and the family decides who is in.
The other half of the reason is the part people feel before they can name it. In most families the knowledge sits in people. One elder remembers the names, an aunt keeps the recipes, a cousin knows how everyone connects. When they go, most of it goes with them, and the voices are the hardest to recover. A family that has somewhere to set that down can set it down while there is still time.
Our Principles
Seven Things That Are True Of Your Family's Record
Each one is something the product does rather than something we mean to do, and each one closes a door that would otherwise be easy to walk through.
There Is No Number Next To Your Name
No followers, no posts, no score. Nothing counts what you have added or ranks you against your cousins, and that is not a setting we left switched off. The app cannot be asked who is most active, so there is nothing to build a leaderboard out of.
The Elders Come First
Every list of your family runs oldest first, and you sit in your own place among your siblings rather than at the top of it. Someone whose birth year nobody ever wrote down keeps their place too. They are not moved to the back for a missing date.
A Record Arrives With Its Source, Or It Does Not Arrive
Every clan name, praise and history here names where it was read from. One that loses its source stops the site from building rather than reaching you looking exactly as trustworthy as one that kept it.
Community-Recorded, And It Says So
Nothing in the heritage record is marked verified, because nobody has verified it. Native-speaker review is outstanding for all twelve languages. Every page says that plainly instead of letting the silence suggest otherwise.
What Is Missing Is Said Out Loud
Where a praise is recorded but the wording cannot be published, the page tells you so rather than showing nothing. Silence would read as “this family has no praise”, and that is not true of anybody.
Both People Have To Say So
Somebody becomes your family here when both of you have said so. A request nobody has answered shows nobody anything. Adding a person does not put them in your family, and it does not tell them anything about you.
A Child Is Not In The Directory
A child is not searchable by a stranger and is not offered as anybody's possible relative. Their record sits under an adult in the family, and that authority is carried in the database rather than by the app on a phone.