Still being built. Have a look around — nothing you enter is kept yet. Tell me when it’s ready
Six ways to ask, and one place it all lands.
Some of this you can use today and some of it is still being built. Each one below says which, because a list of features is a promise if it does not.
A map in the stars, not a diagram.
Everyone in your family, and the route between them. A tree tells you who is whose; a map has movement along it — where people came from, where they went, and where you are standing on it.
Margaret Anne
1935 · Portsmouth, Virginia
What her mother sang
The winter the pipes froze
Why she never went back
Somebody has to ask, and nobody ever does.
A question a day, or a question a year. It goes to whoever you choose, they answer in their own voice whenever they can face it, and nobody is nudged or counted. Refusing is a real answer — the person who asked is told nothing at all.
What did your mother sing when she thought no one was listening?
Held.
Four minutes, in your own voice.
No one else can hear it until you say so.
The questions, with nobody waiting.
Everything else here you send, and then you wait. This is the same asking with the waiting taken out. Sitting around a table — a café, a kitchen, a car — say who is there and how far in you want to go, and you are dealt a deck. Each card says who answers, so nobody has to decide. Anyone can pass a card for the whole table without saying why.
Who’s at the table?
What do you think I was like when I was your age?
Say it to yourself first.
Everything you record starts private — unreadable by anyone, including whoever set the family up, and the recording too. You can leave it there for a year, or leave it there and never decide. This is the part that makes a hard thing sayable: you are not publishing, you are writing it down.
Gratitude and the year after
December 2022
What I never told my father
March 2024
The thing about the house
Last week
Nobody can read these but you.
What I never told my father
He asked me once, in the car, and I said I was fine. I have thought about that answer for eleven years.
Written now, for later.
Something sealed until a date you choose — a wedding morning, an eighteenth birthday, a Tuesday in 2041. Until that day nobody can open it but you. We will not tell you it lasts a hundred years; nobody can say that honestly.
- Sealed
- Waiting
- Near
- Open
For you, on the day you become a mother.
From your grandmother · recorded 2024
Four minutes, in her own voice
For Tom, on his wedding morning.
From his father · written 2019
A letter, unopened
One set of questions, asked of everybody.
A wedding, a memorial, a homecoming. You choose three or four questions, everyone invited answers whenever they can, and what comes back gathers in one place instead of scattering across four group chats.
Beginnings
The day something starts, and everyone who got it there.
Things earned
The years behind them, not the ceremony.
Service
Going, coming home, and the careers a family only half sees.
Everyone in one place
Rare enough that it is worth asking while it lasts.
Endings
What people would say, if anyone asked them.
Kids and parents talking together.
A child asks the question. Not a prompt we wrote — theirs, in their words, whatever they actually want to know. You answer it in your own voice, and it stays for them. Most of what a child wonders about their parents goes unasked because there is never a moment for it, and then the moment stops coming.
Questions for you
What’s your favourite animal?
Asked by Oliver, age 6
Asked you 4 things
You answered 3
"I want to be the person who puts the stars back"
age 4
A letter for his eighteenth
sealed
Not built, and it is the one that needs the most care before it is: a child’s question stored for decades, and a parent answering into a record that child grows up reading.
The stories, made into a book a child will actually read.
Take what your family has already said — the people on your map, the answers in their own voices — and set it as a book for the age of the child holding it. A board book for a two-year-old, a picture book at six, a chapter book at ten. The same family history, told three ways as they grow into it.
Board book
Ten pages. One sentence each. The names of the people who love them.
Printed and posted
Picture book
A single story, told properly. The winter the pipes froze.
Printed and posted
Chapter book
Four generations, in the words they used, with the hard parts left in.
Printed and posted
Not built. The name for this is also unsettled — it has been called Storyborn, and that may not be available.
Start with one question, to one person, tonight.