Build & Defend Newsletter 30

One email a week - something from which I hope you'll get real value. We talk about things we can build, and how to defend them. That can apply to cybersecurity, physical buildings, digital products, and .... just about anything. It gives me a lot of latitude in what I can write about, but the two concepts are important for progress - as individuals, and as society.

Today's topic is: the family story bank.

Most families have a photo problem.

Not that they do not have enough photos. Nobody has that problem any more. We have more photographs of an average Tuesday than our grandparents had of their entire lives. We have pictures in iCloud, Google Photos, old Facebook albums, WhatsApp threads, a USB stick labelled FINAL, and possibly one laptop that nobody is allowed to touch because it has “all the photos” on it.

The real problem is that the pictures have escaped the stories.

There is a photograph of someone in a very 1970s shirt, at a party, holding a drink and looking delighted. Who is he? Why did that party matter? Was that before or after the move, the marriage, the job that changed everything, the argument nobody mentions, or the event that became family folklore? In twenty years, the file might still exist. The meaning probably will not.

A family story bank is a small, deliberate collection of the things people know but have not written down: voices, explanations, photographs with names, recipes with the bits that say “you will know when it is right,” stories from school, moves, jobs, marriages, losses, ridiculous decisions that worked out, and the people who made you who you are.

This is not a grand ancestry project requiring a tweed jacket, a pipe, and a shelf full of binders. It is a system simple enough to use while the people who know the stories are still here to tell them. We used to do it by writing on the backs of the photos. Today we can do it a little differently.

Start with one folder that your family can understand without a technical support contract.

Call it Family Story Bank, The Quinlan Archive, Things We Do Not Want To Forget, or something less likely to sound like a minor museum wing. Give it four parts:

Record conversations. A phone is enough. You are not producing The Ken Burns Documentary of Your Family, although if you want to add a slow pan across an old photo and a banjo, I will not stop you. The important thing is not to ask, “Tell me your life story.” That is how you get ten minutes of weather and a suspiciously incomplete account of everything that happened in college that you can still remember.

Ask specific questions:

One question often becomes an hour. That is fine. Do not rush to the next prompt just because the app has a progress bar.

Make a simple page for each important person. Name, relationship, dates if you know them, places they lived, photographs, and a few stories attached to their name.

Do not wait until you can make it comprehensive. “Grandad, born in London, used to turn off his hearing aid box (which was the size of a tape recorder which he kept attached to his belt) anytime he didn't want to listen to anything..." is a much better beginning than an empty genealogy database.

The objects are often the hooks. A watch, a recipe card, a school report, an old tool, a programme from a wedding, a postcard, a battered paperback, a house key that opens nothing now.

Photograph the object. Write down what it is, who owned it, and why it mattered. The object may survive. Its explanation is usually the part that gets lost first.

Keep one very boring family timeline: births, moves, schools, jobs, marriages, homes, trips, losses, businesses, and the odd event that changed the direction of things.

A timeline does not need to be polished. It needs to give a future reader enough scaffolding to understand that the photograph of the strange shirt came before the move to London, not after it. Context is the difference between an archive and a box of mysterious stuff.

The key design choice is to keep everything in ordinary, portable formats. Audio files. JPEGs or PNGs. PDFs. Plain text or Markdown notes. These are the boring formats that will still open when the exciting family-memory app of 2026 has been acquired, renamed, redesigned, and quietly discontinued in 2029.

The first defence is obvious: back it up. Keep one copy where you work on it, one copy in a cloud service you trust, and one copy separate from both. If the archive exists only on a phone, it exists only until the phone meets a swimming pool, a taxi, or a child with a passcode guesser. I use Evernote for almost all my notes, which includes copies of everything I can scan (which is just about everything) as well as screenshots, notes, images, pictures, etc. It's actually quite versatile for something like this.

But technical backup is only half the job. A story bank has several less obvious failure modes.

Defend Against Unnamed People

Every photograph is a future puzzle unless you label it now. Add the names, place, approximate date, and one sentence about why it matters. Future descendants are clever, but they should not have to become forensic historians just to work out who is standing next to Aunt Margaret at a barbecue in 1986.

Defend Against Platform Captivity

Do not make a social-media platform the only keeper of your family history. Platforms are good places to share selected moments. They are terrible places to store the one canonical explanation of them. Export your material periodically. Keep your original files. Make the archive useful without a login, a subscription, or the goodwill of a company whose core business is showing advertisements between baby photos. For me, for photos, since we have Google and Apple as the primary photo creation tools, I also have Amazon Photos on all my devices so there's a consistent second place in which they are stored. I export my Evernote notes every so often as well.

Defend Against Private Material Becoming Public Material

Not every story should be shared with every relative, and certainly not with the whole internet. Family history can include adoptions, estrangements, health details, financial troubles, old relationships, and things a living person entrusted to you in confidence.

Use simple access labels:

That last category matters. The answer to “how do we preserve this?” is not always “put it in a cloud folder”. Sometimes the right answer is “tell the right person, in person”.

Defend Against Perfectionism

The archive does not need a curator before it has a first story. Start ugly. A recording with background noise is better than the perfect interview that never happens. A photograph labelled “Mum and Dad, probably 1971, first apartment in New York?” is better than an unlabeled photograph and a promise to sort it later.

The enemy here is not disorder. It is delay.

You do not need specialised genealogy software to start. A modest stack looks like this:

If you want help getting the conversations started, StoryCorps has a genuinely good collection of interview prompts. The Library of Congress also has practical family-preservation guidance, which feels slightly grand until you realise that your kitchen table can be an archive if you decide it is.

StoryCorps Great Questions List
Specific prompts that produce better conversations than “so, tell me about yourself.”

Library of Congress
Preserving Your Family Treasures: practical guidance for photographs, paper, recordings, and digital material.

US National Archives
Preserve Your Family Archives: a useful, no-nonsense starting point for handling and organising materials.

Internet Archive
A reminder that preserving culture is not only the job of institutions.

This week, ask one person one question:

What is a story about our family that you do not want forgotten?

Record the answer, label the file, and save it somewhere that is not just a chat thread.

You do not need to finish the archive. You need to start catching the stories while they are still in the room.

Thanks for reading this newsletter! Feel free to respond any time.

Thomas

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