Preserving Family Stories

Introduction

Since the invention of fire, humankind has been telling stories and sharing memories. It’s a way to connect, to entertain, to educate, and to pass down family history. A good story can make you laugh, cry, inspire you, or anything in between. In modern societies, families live far apart, folks work long hours, and much of our connection and storytelling happens online. There is no substitute for in person human connection. However, for many of us, myself included, the opportunity to preserve family stories is becoming increasingly more difficult. In this article, we explore digital options for preserving family stories and history.

Why Preserve Family Stories?

There are a variety of reasons to preserve family stories and history -

Preserving culture: For a nation like the U.S., which is predominantly composed of primarily immigrants like the U.S., (almost) everyones’ family is from somewhere else.

Preserving stories from your country of origin is a way to honor the past, to remember the people that made sacrifices to give us better opportunities. Connecting to other cultures gives us diverse perspectives, and empathy for other ways of life.

Learning from the past: Life has a tendency to dish out many lessons. While experiencing something first hand is one of the best ways to learn, there are some lessons I would rather learn from others.

In learning your history you can better understand the decisions that shape your life, and plan accordingly. Someone once said, those who are ignorant of their past, are doomed to repeat it.

Inspiration: Every family has stories of great successes, overcoming adversity, building something from nothing, standing up to injustice, and fighting for the betterment of a community. Taking the time to learn these stories can empower you to take action, share lessons with future generations, and give you a sense of pride of what is possible.

Remembrance: Some people say that you die twice, once when your body dies, and then again when your memory is forgotten. Remembering those we love can take the shape of sharing a story, a joke, a song, a recipe. Not only does it keep their memory alive, it helps us to process grief, and come to terms with our own mortality. Heavy I know, but continuing a bond with the deceased is a beautiful way of passing on family history.

Remembrance doesn’t have to be only for one person, but can also be for a collective event that becomes part of a shared history. Human history is marked by horrific events of oppression, abuse, and injustice.

The history of the Americas is founded on atrocities against native peoples, slavery, and imperialism in the name of religion and economic expansion. The world has experienced atrocities beyond human comprehension that we must document and learn from so as to not repeat. Events like the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia’s killing fields, the Armenian genocide, and Rwandan genocide. As difficult as it is to relive these events, they have shaped human history. The documentation of the individual personal histories of those who experienced these crimes, is critical to the advancement of future generations.

Identity: Family stories represent our own personal history. What country our ancestors lived in, why they chose to emigrate, what challenges they had to overcome. Struggling with identity is part of our journey as human beings. A piece of that journey is tied to our collective past, where we came from, who our parents and grandparents were, it all plays a role in forming our identity. It doesn’t need to define us, but certainly uncovering that past is an unimportant clue for understanding who we are.

Sensemaking: Sensemaking or sense-making is the process by which people give meaning to their collective experiences. It has been defined as "the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing" (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005, p. 409) source: wikipedia. Well that’s a mouthful. In my personal experience, the act of telling a story about an important life event or situation helps me to better understand and process the occurrence. Even if I never go back to those writings again, the sheer act of writing it down, structuring it, thinking about it and putting it on paper (real or virtual) helps me to make sense of my experiences.

Intergenerational connection: Wow, I have to find a better phrase for that, lol. What I mean is spending time with folks from different generations. Grandkids taking the time to learn grandpa’s stories.

Adult children, taking a moment to learn their parent’s love story. Sharing these moments will bring you closer together, warm your heart, and you’ll learn more about each other’s perspectives.

What are Family Story Examples?

So what family stories can you share? Well, stories are shared digitally all the time, via text message, email, blog post, and social media. If pictures are worth a thousand words, then there are a lot of stories out there on the internet. For the purposes of this article, we are referring to stories that could be passed down to future generations. Stories that preserve and share a personal history, who you were, where you lived, what wise lessons you have to pass down to all future progeny. If you want to include the occasional cat meme, well that’s fine too. Below we’ve shared a few of the more common types of stories, to help spur ideas.

Biographies: Biographies were once reserved for the elite, famous, or infamous. Today, there is nothing stopping a regular José or Josefina from crafting his/her/their own masterpiece. The hard part isn’t telling the stories, it’s getting it captured in an easy to digest way. More on that later. A biography can start with a handful of questions and build over time, there likely isn’t an overbearing publisher pressuring you to deliver a manuscript so, take your time.

Memorials: So often in life, we don’t truly know what we had, until it’s gone. Or even if we did, it still hurts like heck. Memorials are a proven way to not only honor the dead, but help manage grief. The act of remembrance, sense making through storytelling, and continuing a bond with the deceased is a healthy part of the grief journey. Many religions and cultures have made this into several day long celebrations like Mexico’s Día de Muertos.

You can also make your own online digital memorial at www.Lalo.Memorials. As families live apart, and visiting gravesites becomes more difficult, we think a digital memorial is a great option to preserve the memories of those we’ve lost.

Life Events: The two most photographed and documented events in one’s life are typically the first year on earth and your wedding day. I said typically, if you’re the 5th child or it’s your 3rd wedding, there may not be a lot of documentation.

Regardless, there are on average 78-80 years worth of other memories you can document as well. This is completely personal to you and your family and can be anything from your graduation day, first job, new apartment, or a big achievement in your life.

Travel: Going on trips is a way to unplug and gain a new perspective.

Whether it’s a day trip to that quaint little town with the handmade fudge and gas station that rents DVDs; or a voyage across the globe to a land with a different time zone, language, and definition of what constitutes spicy food on a 5 star scale. Documenting your travels is a long time honored tradition.

Year in Review: In my family my step dad used to send out a letter (by snail mail!) with a year in review. I realize now, that is very overachieving on his part. However, with the comforts of modern technology there is no reason why you couldn’t create a simple memento for the year that you can look back on in the future or that the next generation will value as a snapshot of an era.

Journaling: One of the most common tools to care for your mental health is journaling.

The act of taking a mindful moment, jotting down your thoughts and feelings has a wonderfully positive impact on your wellbeing, for only a few minutes of investment. A great Return on Time and Effort once you get into a steady habit.

Just Because: Inside jokes, an impromptu conversation with a friend, a current event that impacted you in a surprising way, a random act of kindness.

You don’t need a reason to share a story. If something moved you that day, capture it, share it or keep it for yourself. It’s like saving money for a rainy day, except for your emotional bank account. There are days when we could all use a lift, and the option to look back on one of these moments in your life can have a positive impact on your day. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut or view the world from a myopic point of view, the ability to zoom out and put things in perspective can bring a slice of relief.

What is the Best Family Story App?

Now that you’ve learned about the benefits of preserving stories and a few examples of commonly shared personal stories, let’s learn about how Lalo can help you capture, share and preserve your family stories. This section will seek to answer the following questions -

1. What is the best app to record family stories?

2. What is the best app to share family stories?

3. What is the best app for stories?

4. What is the best family heirloom and story app?

We may be a little biased, but I stand behind the statement that Lalo is the best app to preserve, share, and discover family stories.

There are four basic building blocks we kept in mind when designing the Lalo app :

1. Privacy: A simple principle we stand by is that your data is yours. You decide who you share it with and when. You can take it with you at any time. You can use our tools to help tell your stories, preserve, and share them but at the end of the day what you’ve created is yours to keep.

2. Social: Although there is certainly value in telling your story, as in the journaling example above; we think the real value in Lalo is in connecting with others. In sharing your story and discovering new ones. In knowing that your legacy is being preserved for future generations to enjoy. Much like the campfires of old, an intimate gathering for close friends and family.



3. Beautiful: We wanted the app to look and feel calm and safe. This is as much about the colors we chose and a clean and modern UI, as it is what isn’t there. Specifically advertisements and marketplaces. Our business model is simple, we will share our space and tools for a monthly rate. We are not looking to open up the floodgates to third party sellers or advertisers. While this would make the economics more attractive to both of us (a free product for you and potentially more money for us), we don’t think it’s the right thing to do in the long run. For folks to be able to share meaningful stories, there has to be calm and trust. I can’t have a serious conversation with my partner while I’m at a slot machine. I’m not going to pass on my life lessons to my daughter while I’m at a used car dealership. Nothing wrong with those places, but it’s hard to get in the right mindset with distractions. Also, those places were designed for an entirely different purpose.



4. Approachable: We wanted our solutions to be easy to access and use. We launched on both Google Play and Apple App store, and will have a desktop offering in the near future. The user interface is simple, yet we’ve packed a lot of features into a small space. Our app has been free since launching in May, and will eventually transition to a “freemium” model. This means there will always be a free option to use Lalo, and our paid option will be affordable. We won’t keep your data hostage, as mentioned above, the data is always yours. This means your data will always be viewable and you can take it with you at any time. The last piece of this is language options. Our questions prompts are available in over 30 languages and we will continue to offer options that are inclusive for all age groups and backgrounds.

Customer Obsession: We’ve been working on the Lalo app for some time, we were in beta for several months, have collected hundreds of customer surveys and interviews, and take customer feedback very seriously. Before launching Lalo, I spent 8+ years at Amazon. Part of what allowed them to become successful was their relentless focus on the customer. Adding more selection, faster shipping, and lowering prices. It was a simple formula to remember, but a lot harder to execute. One of the most well known mechanisms of Amazonian culture that put a laser focus on customer feedback was the famous “question mark email” from founder Jeff Bezos. When you serve 100M+ customers per month things can go sideways at times. Whenever a customer sent an email to Jeff @ amazon.com, it would be reviewed in the early days by the man himself, in later years there was an entire team assigned to scan and triage the messages.

I remember working on some of those emails and wondering, why would the world’s richest man be concerned with a random customer email. The answer was simple, he wasn’t. What he was concerned with was the anecdote the message contained. Defects can often hide in the data, but customer feedback never lies. The question mark in his email (and yes that was it, there were no other words or characters in the email apart from the customer’s message) was shorthand for hey leader at Amazon, you told me our product or service worked in a certain way, yet this customer’s question directly contradicts that. We would scramble like high school kids in 80s movies cleaning up the house after a big bash just before the parents got home. It was stressful as hell, but you would learn a lot in a short period of time - identify the issue, define the root cause, create an action plan, measure the impact of your changes and iterate on the solution until the problem was fixed. Super easy. 8 years of that lol, good times. Say what you will about Amazon’s culture, but they sure know how to operate a business at scale. Anyway, that was a super-long story (very non-Amazonian may I add) simply to say we take customer feedback seriously. So if you ever have a negative experience or a suggestion please email me at juan@lalo.app.

• Digital Storytelling: The ability to create multimedia stories that combine audio, video, and images to tell a story.



• Integrations: The flexibility to bring in memories from not only your device, but commonly used services like Google Photos. More integrations coming soon.



• Privacy: A wide range of privacy options that allow you to easily curate your experience to share only with the folks you want to share with. None of your posts are searchable by Google or other search engines. No one that downloads the app can see if you’re on the app or not.



• Calm: No advertisements, no marketplaces. We want your experience to be calm and mindful, meaning you use the app when YOU want. If you want to use it every day or once a month that is up to you. We prefer that you spend your time out in the real world making memories with the people you love.

Over time we will continue to make it easier to add memories, share stories, and preserve your family history in different ways. If you have requests, ideas, bugs or concerns you would like to share with me, please I love talking to users! Talk soon :) - Juan (juan@lalo.app)