Ask her now. Print it later.
HandedDown turns what your family remembers into a bound book. Record a conversation, write down what you already know, invite the people who know the rest. We set it in type and print it. Everyone can add stories for free.
Free for every family, kept running by the families who support it.
Margaret Ellen Doyle41
The house on Ardmore Road
She was born in the back bedroom in 1931, the fourth of seven, and the only one of them who stayed. The road was not paved until she was nine.
“My father kept the good coat on a nail by the door and it hung there twenty years. He wore it to two weddings and every funeral.”
How it goes
Three things, in order
Mrs. Bill Stagg with the quilt she made. Pie Town, New Mexico, 1940. 1
Write down what you know
Names, dates, the four stories you can already tell. Ten minutes is enough to start.
The Caudill family at dinner. Pie Town, New Mexico, 1940. 2
Ask the people who know more
Invite them by email. Record a phone call or sit an interview — we transcribe it and you correct what the machine got wrong. Contributing is free for everyone you invite.
The Library of Congress bindery, about 1920. 3
Print it
Pick who the book is about and we set it in type — photographs, a family tree, their own words kept apart from everyone else's. It arrives bound.
Consent
Nobody is printed who said no
Anyone you invite to your family can read a story about them and refuse it, and that refusal holds after they die. A relative who remembers it differently can say so beside your version, and neither of you can delete the other — we record what people assert, we do not arbitrate families.
Letters can be sealed until a date, or until the person who wrote them is gone. Until then nobody reads them, including us, and including the person they are about.
Durability
Built to outlast us
Imagine your great-great-great-grandparent had written a book about the best memories of their life, and the people in them. The moments that made them, and the ones that delighted them. Imagine finding something in it that you see in yourself.
We can't give you that book. We can help you give one to your great-great-grandchild.
The promise is six generations. That is a promise about formats, not about this company. Your whole archive — every photograph at full print size, every story as plain text — downloads any time, free, whether or not you ever support us.
Nothing is ever held back for want of payment.
Honestly
Why you should pick a competitor
Are you tired of being “sold” things? I sure am. You won't get that here. To prove it, here is why you shouldn't choose us for your stories.
The stories are not going to write themselves down.
Start with one person and one afternoon. You can invite the rest of the family whenever you are ready.