A life, in chapters
The MemoriesBox timeline files every recorded answer under one of 21 chapters of a life — childhood, school, family, love, work, beliefs, losses, wisdom, messages to family — so that hours of audio can be read as a book rather than searched as a folder of files.
Facts on this page verified
What it is
After six months of recording there are perhaps fifteen hours of audio. Fifteen hours is not an archive. It is a problem, unless somebody organises it.
The timeline is that organisation. Every one of the 380 questions belongs to one of 21 chapters, so every answer is filed the moment it is recorded: the childhood is in one place, the years in the factory are in another, and the parts nobody in the family had heard before are findable rather than buried at minute forty-one of a Tuesday.
Nobody talks in order, and the timeline exists precisely because they do not. A person remembers the war because a photograph of a car reminded them of a road. The recording keeps that. The timeline puts it where it belongs afterwards.
How it works
- Each answer is recorded and transcribed. Both are kept.
- The question it answered already belongs to a chapter, so the answer is filed automatically. Nobody sorts anything. An answer belongs to exactly one chapter — the one its question is in.
- The 21 chapters are fixed, and they are the same for everyone: basics, childhood, school and youth, education, family and roots, love and romance, children and family, career, friendship, hobbies, travel and places, habits and speech, humour and stories, character, values, beliefs and worldview, joys, fears and losses, regrets and forgiveness, wisdom, messages to family. They cannot be renamed, merged or reordered, and that is a design decision: a fixed shelf is one a family can find things on in twenty years.
- Photographs live in their own album, with a voice note on each, rather than inside a chapter. See /features/photos.
- The gaps are visible. The memories page is a contents page — 21 lines, each saying how many answers that chapter holds — so an empty chapter is a list of questions for the next session, not a mystery.
- The chapter names appear in all five site languages. The export lists every answer under its question, in interview order, in a text file and an offline index; the chapters are the interview's own, so no separate structure file is needed. See /features/export.
What a chapter holds
| In a chapter | What it is |
|---|---|
| The audio | The sessions where that period or subject was discussed, as recorded |
| The transcript | The text of those sessions, alongside the audio |
| Photographs and documents | The originals attached to that part of the story |
| The gaps | The chapters nobody has answered yet |
The last row is the one families use most. It turns a vague intention to record more into a specific question to ask on Sunday. The one row that is not there yet is "people and places" as a thread you can follow across chapters: today you follow a name by reading the transcripts, which the export makes searchable.
Why the words are not rewritten
There is a real choice here and the industry has mostly made the other one.
Remento, at $99 a year with a hardcover book included, has a feature called Speech-to-Story that turns a spoken answer into written prose. It produces something readable, and for a printed book that is a reasonable thing to want. What it also does is smooth the way the person actually talks: the repetitions, the false starts, the sentence that stops halfway because they decided not to say it.
We keep those. The transcript is what was said, and the audio is the primary record. If your mother said "well, no, that's not right, it was the other summer", that stays in, because in twenty years that sentence will sound more like her than any tidied paragraph would.
If what you want at the end is a well-written book, be clear-eyed: StoryWorth's hardcover, included from $59 a year, is better than what we produce today. Our printed book starts at $139 and is a separate purchase from the subscription. See /products/memory-book.
What it will not do
- It will not rewrite anybody's words into prose. No smoothing, no literary voice, no invented connective sentences between two things that were said months apart.
- It will not fill an empty chapter. If nobody has answered the questions about school, that chapter shows its count and nothing else. A generated summary of a period the person never described would be fiction with a heading on it.
- It will not correct the facts. If a year is wrong, it stays as recorded, and a family member can note the correction alongside it. What someone remembers is itself part of the record.
- It will not decide what matters. No chapter is presented as more important than another, and there is no completion score for a life.
- It will not let the structure drift. The 21 chapters are the same for every archive and cannot be renamed, merged or reordered, so what a grandchild finds in twenty years is on the same shelf it was put on.
- It will not show anything to anybody without a key. Chapters follow the same access rules as everything else. See /features/family-and-heirs.
What it's for
It is for the person who will go looking in fifteen years, who is probably not the person who paid for the subscription.
53% of British adults learned something new about a family member after that person had died, and 43% of them found it while clearing out a home (Ancestry.co.uk, November 2022, n=2,000). The discovery usually happens by accident, in a bad week, in a house that has to be emptied by Friday. A chaptered archive is the version of that where somebody can simply look up what their grandfather did between leaving school and getting married.
It is also what makes the printed book possible, and what makes a good question obvious. If you want the method for filling the gaps rather than the software, /questions/by-decade is free and works with anybody's recorder.
Questions people ask
How are MemoriesBox recordings organised?
Into 21 fixed chapters of a life, automatically: each of the 380 questions belongs to a chapter, so every answer is filed the moment it is recorded, with its audio and transcript together. The export lists every answer under its question in the same order.
Does MemoriesBox edit or rewrite what my father said?
No. The transcript is what was said, and the audio is the primary record. Hesitations, corrections and repetitions stay in, because they are part of how he sounded.
Can I see what has not been recorded yet?
Yes. The memories page shows all 21 chapters with the number of answers each one holds, so an empty or thin chapter is visible at a glance, which is the most practical way to decide what the next session should cover.
Can the timeline be printed as a book?
Yes. A printed book starts at $139 and is a separate purchase from the $139 annual subscription. StoryWorth's included hardcover, from $59 a year, is a better book than ours today, and we would rather say so here than have you find out later.
Related: What MemoriesBox does · How the interview works · Photographs, placed in the story · Everything is yours, in formats that outlive us · Take everything with you · Where your recordings live
If the gaps are the part that worries you, start here. $139 a year, first 14 days free, cancel anytime.