A census return tells you she existed. It does not tell you she could not stand the sea.
Records are a solved problem. Ancestry and Findmypast have the certificates, the censuses and the parish registers, and they are very good at it. What no record holds is what a person was actually like, and that is the part every family loses first.
You do not build the tree. Tagging builds it for you.
On every other family history service, the tree is the first job and it is a chore: a blank chart you fill in from certificates before you get anything back. Storees works the other way round. You tag people in photographs because you want the photograph labelled, and the tree assembles itself out of that, from memory, without anyone sitting down to do it.
Nobody needs a certificate
Say that Ray was Frank’s brother and the tree records it as remembered, not proven. Certainty is a property of each link, not a barrier to adding it. A shaky memory in the tree beats a perfect blank.
Births and marriages as they happen
Add a baby and everyone sees it. The new person has a place in the tree from day one and inherits every memory they will later be tagged in. Marriages join two trees rather than copying one into the other.
Every person is a doorway
Tap anyone and you get their memories, every place they lived, every voice recording they appear in, and the map of their life. The tree is not the destination. It is the index.
What survives four generations, and what does not.
| Survives | Gone within two generations |
|---|---|
| Names, dates, addresses | What she sounded like |
| Occupations and parishes | Why they left Preston |
| A handful of undated photographs | Which one in the photograph she is |
| A headstone, if it is maintained | The reason nobody spoke to that side of the family |
Everything in the right hand column is currently held in the heads of people in their eighties, and it is retrievable today for the cost of asking.
The archive your great-grandchildren open.
Storees is not a twelve month project that finishes with a printed book. It has no end state. It gathers weight, and the longer it runs the less replaceable it becomes.
People, not files
Tagging builds a real picture of who is who. Over time the archive knows that the woman in the white dress is the same woman in the wheelchair in 2019.
A map of a family
Every address anyone lived at, on one map, across a century. You can see a family move down a valley, or leave a country.
Kept as spoken
A transcript is useful. The audio is the thing. It is also the single most likely item in the archive to be irreplaceable.
Four generations of the same three streets.
The Calloways have lived within two miles of the same stretch of coast since 1901. Seen as a list of addresses that is administrative. Seen on a map it is a story about work, about a mill closing, and about one son who went to Canada and came back.
Prototype data. The Calloways are invented.