One archive. Everyone who remembers anything.
Most services in this space are built around a single storyteller answering a weekly email. Storees assumes the opposite: that a family’s memory is distributed, and that the person who remembers the detail you need is usually not the person paying.
Collect
Anyone in the archive can add something. A photo from a drawer, a paragraph typed on a phone, or a recorded answer to a question Storees asked. Every item records who added it and when, so the archive is also a record of who cared enough to put it there.
Photographs
Scanned, uploaded, or taken of an object. Date them roughly if that is all you know. Approximate beats absent.
Written memories
Two sentences is a memory. The bar is deliberately low, because the alternative is nothing.
Recorded stories
For everything from before photographs. Storees asks a question, records the answer, transcribes it, and keeps the audio exactly as it was spoken.
Tagging is the invitation.
When you tag your brother in a photograph, he is not a name in a caption. He is invited, he can see it, and he can add the half of the story you never knew. This is how an archive started by one person ends up holding four people’s memories, and why the best thing in it is usually something you did not put there yourself.
Whit Walk, Lancaster, about 1958
Nana Edie in the white dress, second from the left. Nobody is sure who the boy on the end is.
That is Uncle Ray.
“He would have been about nine. They sent him up from Preston for the summer because his mother was poorly. He stayed two years in the end and nobody ever really explained it.”
Tagging does not label a photograph. It creates a person.
The moment somebody is tagged they exist in the archive, whether or not they have ever heard of us, and whether or not they are still alive. Everything anyone adds about them from then on gathers in one place.
Edie Calloway
1937, living. Wife of Frank. Mother of Margaret and Pete. Grandmother of Amy and Josh.
Her page holds every photograph she appears in, every story she told, every address she lived at, and the map of the whole lot. Four people have added to it and none of them had to agree on anything first.
Anchor
Pin the memory to where it happened. Not a country or a town, the actual spot. The archive then becomes something you can look at as a map, walk through as a route, or open at street level when the building itself has gone.
Find it however you can
Search an address, drop a pin, or say “the old mill at Halton” and confirm it on the map. Precision is nice. Presence is what matters.
Open it at street level
Where imagery exists, stand outside the house. This is the moment that makes people cry, and the reason the map is not a gimmick.
Fly the whole life
Every place someone lived, worked, married and is buried, joined into one cinematic pass over the map. Made for the eulogy nobody knew how to write.
Resurface
The hard truth about family archives is that people build them and then never open them again. Storees’s real job after the first year is bringing things back.
Families fall out. The archive should not.
Somebody will stop speaking to somebody. There will be a divorce, a disputed will, a person who needs to be kept away from another person. Any product that holds a family’s memories and has not thought about this has not thought about families.