Questions & answers

No - one shared archive for the whole family. The owner creates it once and invites everyone else; each person signs in and adds to the same timeline and tree. (You can belong to more than one - both sides of a family, say - and switch between them.)

Yes. The simpler screen has two big buttons - Tell a story and Add a photograph- and your own stories underneath, and nothing else. Telling a story is: press the red button, talk, press stop, then give it a name and a year if you want one. It is the same archive: what you record that way sits on the same timeline as everyone else’s. Turn it on or off yourself under Your account, and whoever looks after the archive can switch it on for you when they invite you, or later from the members page. They cannot switch it off again - that stays your choice.

Whoever invited you can say which person in the family tree you are, so the first screen asks you to confirm it. Saying yes links your account to your own place in the tree, which is how the app knows to greet you by the name your family uses. Saying no changes nothing and loses nothing - if it was the wrong person, or you are not sure, say no and ask them.

Really. You type your email, we send a link, you tap it, you’re in. Nothing to remember or reset. If the link doesn’t arrive, check spam, and use it on the same device where you asked for it.

Both accounts are kept, side by side, and nothing ever decides who is right. The disagreement is part of the record - often the most interesting part. Add your version as a memory beneath theirs.

An optional nudge. Turn it on in Email alerts and once a week you get one warm question with a button straight into a pre-filled story - no need to think of what to say. Answer early, or add any story of your own, and you won’t be asked again that week. An archive owner can write their own questions, reorder the list, or ask for suggestions based on gaps in the timeline - an ancestor nobody’s told a story about yet, say - from Weekly questions in Archive settings.

One person, part-time, for their own family, on ordinary well-documented tools. It’s built so that if the maintainer ever steps away, the archive keeps working and can be exported without them.

Yes. Your family’s archive is separated from every other family’s at the deepest level of the system - not a setting that can be switched off by accident, but the way it’s built. There’s no public feed and no advertising. If you ever share a link outside the family, living relatives are hidden by default and private stories are never included.

When you sign in and start an archive, your email is used to send the occasional service notice - planned maintenance, and changes or new features worth knowing about. That’s all. Never marketing, and never passed to anyone else. The only other access to your archive is the administrative kind needed to keep it running - backups, database health, putting a fault right - and your stories and photographs are never browsed or shared.

Yes. When you add or edit a story, “Who can see this” offers Only the people I choose, and you tick the names. That hides the story, its photographs and its recording from everyone else - including the person who looks after the archive, unless you tick them too. It is also left out of the family download and the printed book.

What it cannot do is take a name out of words somebody else has written, or out of a recording somebody else has made. Nothing can. Families are complicated - divorces, second marriages, things one part of the family knows and another does not - and this is honest about how far it goes. If it needs to go further than that, a separate archive is the only complete answer.

No. Being someone’s cousin in the tree grants no access at all. Who can see and do what is decided only by the owner, by role (owner, editor, viewer). The tree is about people, not permissions.

Optionally, yes. An owner can switch on question suggestions in the archive settings; when it’s on, adding a photograph sends a small copy to our AI provider, which offers a few gentle questions to get you talking - “whose was the car?”, “what was the occasion?” It only ever suggests questions; it never writes your story, guesses who people are, or saves anything. It’s off unless you choose it, because it’s the one time a photo leaves the archive. Leave it off and everything works exactly as before.

The copy that is sent is cleaned first. Where a photograph was taken, when, and what took it are all stripped out before it leaves us - and if any of that cannot be removed, the photograph is not sent at all and you simply get no suggestions. The picture kept in the archive is untouched: an old scan’s hidden date is sometimes the only date anyone has.

Yes. On a computer, “Start a video session” gives you a live preview with a camera and microphone picker; on a phone it opens your own camera instead, which is better quality and saves the clip locally first. You can also upload a clip you already have. Trimming the start and end never cuts the original file - photos, audio and writing are unlimited, and video has a per-archive allowance since it’s the one thing that costs real money to store.

They don’t any more. The lines that follow along with the voice now show your corrected words, still highlighting in time, so a surname or a village you put right is put right everywhere you can see it.

It works by matching your corrected text against what the machine heard, word by word, and giving each of your words the moment the machine’s word was spoken. That is exact wherever the words are the same, which is nearly all of them. If you replace the whole thing with something completely different, there is nothing left to match against - so it says so rather than guessing, keeps the machine’s lines, and shows your version underneath as before.

Nothing is re-sent anywhere to do this, and the original recording and the machine’s first attempt are both still kept.

Yes, and you should. Open the story, choose Edit, and under the player there is Trim: two sliders for where it starts and where it stops. Press play, pause at the right moment and tap Use playhead- the throat clearing at the front and the “was that alright?” at the end stop being played.

Nothing is cut. The whole recording is still kept exactly as it was spoken, and clearing the trim brings all of it back - this year or in thirty. That matters more than it sounds: what somebody thinks is a fluff today can be the only moment their laugh is on the recording.

If you would rather record it again, Remove this recording puts it in the recycle bin and Add a recording is right beneath. An archive owner can bring it back from the bin, so a change of heart costs nothing.

Before you save, tap Turn or trim beside the photograph. You can turn it a quarter at a time until it is the right way up, and - if you want to - drag a box over the part worth keeping and drop the rest. It is the same on a phone and on a computer.

Do it before you save. Once a photograph is in the archive we never alter that file again, which is the promise that keeps the original exactly as it came to us. You can still remove a photograph and add a straightened copy, and the archive keeps the story it belonged to.

Yes. The format newer iPhones use is converted for you when you add a photo, and the location travels with it. You don’t need to change any setting on your phone.

Yes - choose a file instead of pressing record. A voice memo off a phone, or a tape someone digitised years ago, both work: MP3, M4A, WAV, OGG and FLAC, up to 25 MB. An uploaded recording is written up automatically and plays with the words following along, exactly like one recorded here. The same goes for video - you can choose a clip you already have rather than filming a new one.

That’s expected, and easy to fix - tap to correct the written copy. The original recording is never touched, and the automatic version is kept underneath, so nothing is lost. The person who recorded it can do this, and so can the archive’s owner.

If you are the archive’s owner, yes. Open the story, press Edit this story, then Edit the title and date. You can change the title, the year, the place, the tags and who appears in it. What you cannot change is the story itself - the words, and whether it is private - because those are hers. If she typed something she wants changed, she edits it from the same page when signed in as herself.

A new archive is free to use for 14 days, no card needed - long enough for two weekends, which is when families are actually together. After that, keeping an archive able to add new stories, photos and recordings costs £5 a month - reading everything and downloading the whole archive stay free forever, whether or not anyone is paying. Founding families are free for good; see below.

Nothing is deleted and nothing breaks. The archive becomes read-only: everyone can still read every story, and the owner can still download the whole archive at any time. Inviting new members pauses too, until the archive is subscribed again - existing members are unaffected. Subscribing again turns everything back on straight away, exactly as it was left.

You’re one of the first families using Our Living Memory, and your archive is free for the life of the service - no subscription, ever, for this one archive. Photos, audio and writing are unlimited; video has a generous lifetime allowance. In return, the main ask is that you use it for real and tell the maintainer what’s clumsy or missing (choose Send feedback from the Support menu). You’ll see the full, short agreement to accept the first time you sign in.

Because paying is the one thing here that isn’t for everybody. An archive is meant to be used by the whole family, children included, so the first time you subscribe, manage billing or contribute, we ask you to confirm two things: that you’re 18 or over, and that the card is yours or the person it belongs to is happy for you to use it. It’s one tap, once, and it’s remembered for your account - you won’t be asked again.

We don’t ask for your date of birth and we don’t check any documents. We’re taking your word for it, which is exactly what it sounds like - we’d rather ask an honest question than collect proof of identity from a family archive. Nothing about reading, adding or downloading your stories is affected either way.

One exception: if you’ve linked yourself to your own person in the family tree and the birth year recorded there would make you under 18, we won’t offer you a payment page at all. If that year is wrong, anyone who can edit people in your archive can correct it on your page in the tree, and the payment pages come back.

Yes. In the bin, tick the item and choose Delete ticked for good - everything else stays where it is, still restorable. Empty the bin is still there for clearing the lot.

This is the one place in the archive where something is genuinely destroyed, so it asks you to type DELETE first, and it removes the original files as well as the entry. Until you do, a deleted item is only hidden, and any owner can put it back.

Yes, and safely. A deleted story, photo or person goes to a recycle bin that the owner can restore from - it isn’t gone forever. So you can’t break the archive by tidying it. Only the owner can empty the bin, and that really does delete everything in it, files included, so it asks you to confirm first.

Not directly through us yet, but the full archive copy you can already download (Archive settings → Download & share a copy) includes a ready-to-print book.pdf. Want a book about just one or two people instead - grandchildren for a particular grandparent, say? Archive settings → Make a booklets you pick who it’s about (or leave everyone unchecked for the whole archive) and hands you a download link, usually in under a minute. Either way: print it at home, take it to a local print shop, or upload it to whichever photo-book service you like (Blurb, Mixbook and similar all accept a PDF). An in-app “order a printed copy” button is on the roadmap.

Your archive survives it. From Archive settings, the owner can request a complete copy - every story, photograph, recording, video and the family tree - as plain web pages plus the original files, a family-tree (GEDCOM) file, and a print-ready book.pdf, along with a link the whole family can use to download it too, no account needed. The export is the real archive; the website is just a pleasant way to use it.