The house on Wilton Road
“Grandad Alf kept his boots by the back door and would not have them in the house. The front room was for visitors and nobody was ever a visitor.”
Why it is important
We used to gather around the old photo album, and the stories came with it. That gathering is what 'Our Living Memory' looks to rebuild.
Someone who was there would point to a face and say who that was, and what was happening at that time, along with any anecdotal stories - and these stories were then passed down, and so on. Distance and busy lives have quietly taken those afternoons away. The albums now live scattered across a dozen devices, and when a child asks “who is that in the photo?” the answer is often a shrug - unless someone thought to write it on the back.
So this is a shared room the whole family can step into whenever the mood strikes: add a photograph, tell the story behind it, and let others add what they remember beneath it. Census records and family trees are already done well elsewhere. What no one keeps is the texture - the sound of a grandmother reading aloud, the feeling on a wedding day, the joke that only makes sense with proper context. That is the part that vanishes, and it is the only thing Our Living Memory is really trying to save.
What we believe
The driving principles
- The recording matters more than the transcript. You will re-read the words. You will only ever hear the voice if it was kept. So the voice is kept first, and the writing is laid gently on top.
- There's always two sides to any story. Two siblings will describe the same kitchen differently. Our Living Memory keeps both accounts and never tries to decide who is right - because the disagreement is part of the record.
- The archive must outlive the software. Assume every website here is gone in fifteen years. What your family records is yours to walk away with, in a form that will still open long after.
How it works
Record it. Keep it. Find it again.
1
Record
Speak into your phone, start a video session, or upload a photograph and tell the story behind it. Give it a year and a place. That all that is needed.
2
Keep
The original is stored untouched and audio is written up automatically, so the recording becomes searchable - and you can correct the spelling to maintain accuracy.
3
Explore
Everything lands on a shared timeline by year, with photographs shown along it. Open an entry to read it, see the pictures, hear it spoken with the words following along - and add your own memory of that day beneath it. Give each person their own page, and walk the family tree from a name to the stories that name appears in.
The gentlest way in
A picture is worth a thousand words
Choose an old photograph and simply talk about it - where it was taken, who is in it, what else happened that day. Warm prompts appear when you are not sure where to begin, so a relative who has never used an app can leave something wonderful on their first try.
If a blank page is the hard part
One warm question, once a week
Turn on a weekly email and it arrives with a single gentle question and a button straight into a pre-filled story - nothing to think up yourself. Answer early, or add any story of your own, and that week's question is marked answered. An owner can write their own questions too, or ask for suggestions based on gaps in the family's own timeline.
See it
The same event, remembered two ways
Everyone has their own experience of a day out, we allow all experiences, no matter how far the stories diverge - multiple relatives, one summer, multiple honest, yet different memories, side by side on the timeline.
The Carter & Hale families · Leeds
1968
What I remember of the same house
“Ann has this wrong. The boots were by the coal shed, not the back door, and the front room smelled of polish because nobody was allowed to breathe in it.”
And it needn't be a whole new entry. Anyone in the family can add a memory beneath a photograph or a story, so one picture gathers everyone's recollections in one place instead of scattering into duplicates.
For everyone
Made for eight-year-olds and ninety-year-olds alike
The people with the best stories are often the least comfortable with technology. So there is nothing to learn and nothing to break.
No passwords, everWe email you a link, you tap it, you are in. That is the entire sign-in - nothing to remember or reset.
Works on the old iPadLarge text, big buttons, no jargon. It runs in the browser, so there is no app to install or update.
The phone does the hard partRecord with the camera and microphone you already know. The file is safe on your phone before anything uploads.
Prompts when you are stuckGentle questions help start a story, so you're never left with a blank page.
Easy to watch togetherCast the timeline to the television the same way you'd cast anything else, or send Nana a private link to open on her own screen.
Yours, and private
A closed door, not a village square
Your family's archive is walled off from every other family's at the deepest level of the system - it's built that way, not a setting that can be switched off by accident. There is no public feed, no algorithm, no advertising. Living relatives can be kept out of anything you might one day share, and anything (or anyone) can be deleted completely.
Built to last
A drive that still opens in 2050
Whenever you like, request a complete copy of the archive - every story, photograph, recording, video and the family tree, as plain web pages plus the original files, a family-tree file any genealogy program reads, and a print-ready book you can print at home or take to a photo-book service of your choice. No login, no subscription, no third party required to open it. Put it on a drive, hand it to a cousin, open it in a browser decades from now. Your originals are never overwritten or re-encoded; the fumbling at the start of a recording is always there, never removed.
The export is the real archive. Everything else is just an easy way to use it.