Digital tools give us volume without cohesion.

Family history now lives:

• •Across phones that get upgraded every few years
• •In cloud accounts owned by individuals
• •Inside platforms designed for sharing, not remembering
• •Buried in inboxes, group chats, and forgotten folders

Each piece feels safe on its own. Collectively, they're precarious — and often neglected.

History disappears not through catastrophe, but through fragmentation. One lost password. One closed account. One person who "meant to organize everything someday."

When archivists talk about preservation, they don't mean storage alone. They mean continuity — the ability for meaning to survive transfer.

A box of letters worked because it traveled intact. A photo album worked because context stayed close to the image. Memory and material moved together.

Digital artifacts don't behave that way.

A photo detached from its story becomes anonymous. A video without names becomes untraceable. A folder structure that made sense to one person becomes opaque to everyone else.

Preserving family history today is less about formats and more about relationships:

• Between people
• Between artifacts and stories
• Between generations

Without those links, information survives — but history doesn't.

Traditionally, one person became the family historian. Everyone else became a consumer of memory.

That model doesn't scale in a digital world.

Ethnographers know this well: history lives in texture. In anecdote. In contradiction. In emotion. In the small, human details that never make it into official records.

The digital age gives us unprecedented tools to capture this texture. Audio, video, annotation, collaboration — bring new color to names and dates — but only if we give it somewhere to live.

Preservation now works best when:

• ✓More than one person can contribute
• ✓Stories can be added, corrected, and expanded
• ✓Context can grow over time
• ✓Memory isn't locked inside a single account or device

Family history becomes more resilient when it's shared — not publicly, but collectively.

This is one of the most surprising shifts of the digital age: preservation improves when authorship is distributed.

Every decision about what to save — and how — carries values.

What gets named? What remains unnamed? Whose voice is recorded? Whose perspective is missing?

In earlier eras, families had fewer choices. Today, we have many — and that makes intention matter all the more.

Preserving family history is about leaving room for complexity, disagreement, and growth. For stories to be added by people who weren't in the room the first time around.

These questions — about continuity, context, and care — are what led us to build Heritable.

Heritable was designed not just to store family history, but to hold it:

• •To connect family trees with photos, videos, documents, and stories
• •To preserve not only the past, but the present as it becomes history
• •To allow families to build something together, over time
• •To keep ownership and control where it belongs: with the family

It's built for families who don't want their history optimized for likes, feeds, or algorithms — but preserved with clarity, privacy, and care.