Unless you’re new around here, you probably know that I’m a little addicted to stories and storytelling.
The thing is, our lives are made up of stories. It’s how we connect with and relate to others. We share stories to pass down life lessons and adventures. But how can we collect all these beautiful stories that are part of your family and personal history?
There are so many stories in every family and not every one gets told. So let’s change that!
Christmas is usually the time when families come together. When generations meet, we get to share and listen to stories of past adventures, and learn about life before we were around or old enough to pay attention. But how do you keep track of them all?
There are actually a number of apps that will help you to record these family stories. There seems to be a great choice of them and all do it a bit differently. I personally haven’t tried them yet so I can’ give you a recommendation which to choose but have a look at these below and see how they can help you collect your own family stories:
Memlife
Preserve memories and milestones from your life, or the lives of family and friends with MemLife. The app works across multiple devices and it seems to be easy to add memories and photos to a timeline and organise life stages. And at the end, you can export a book.
Storyworth
Storyworth can either be done in collaboration with others or by yourself.
It works in 3 stages: Once a week, you choose a question to inspire either the person you want the stories to tell or yourself to write. The story writer will then reply via email which is shared with you and at the end of a year, the stories are bound into a beautiful keepsake book.
Storyworth even has a podcast – I mean, that’s pretty cool I’d say!
My Stories matter
“My Stories Matter leverages the latest academic knowledge in psychology and memory to deliver an age-friendly app that helps you easily recall, collaborate, organize, and share your stories safely, securely, and confidentially.” (Description from their website)
You can upload photos and old documents as well as record family members telling their stories as audio files. That way you can create a timeline and collections to visit different parts of your family’s history.
LifeTales
Lifetales is more than collecting your family history but for the sake of this article, I’m only going to look at that as an option for how to use the app.
The app itself describes it as “Just like a Messaging group but for multimedia stories where the entire family can contribute.”. It’s teamwork to create your family stories and this app seems to make it quite easy to collect lots of different parts of it.
My Life in a book
My Life in a book seems to be similar to Storyworth, where you can choose who’s going to tell the stories. Every week you can choose a prompt or ask a question which will be answered by email and after a year will end up in a book.
I’ve actually spoken to the customer service of “My Life in a book” and it seems to be available in other languages besides English so currently, this is definitely something I could try with parents as well
Now whichever way you prefer to become a better family storyteller – like I said I haven’t tried any of the apps myself yet and can’t give a recommendation – hopefully it inspires you to explore the idea of collecting your family (hi)story. I know that’s the effect those apps have on me. Now I just need to get on it!
And since we’re at the cusp of the Christmas Holidays, chances are that you’ll be around your family over the next few days and weeks. See what you can capture during that time and maybe you can uncover some beautiful adventures you never knew about!
