Why I Built a Private Website to Store my Family’s Core Memories

A lot of you responded enthusiastically to my recent instagram post about the private website I built for my family to store our core memories. As a result, I thought I would explain why I did it, how I did it, and give you ideas on how you can start capturing your family’s core memories more intentionally as well.

Why I Did It

My grandfather on my dad’s side passed away when I was really young. One of my biggest regrets in life is that I all but ignored his very existence the last day that I ever got to see him. He and my grandmother stopped at my childhood home on a roadtrip from Indiana to Alaska, where they were going fly fishing, their favorite thing to do together. I had friends from the neighborhood over, and didn’t want to be bothered by hanging out with my grandparents when there was so much fun to be had running around the neighborhood and front yard on a spectacularly sunny and warm summer day.

As fate would have it, it was on that very trip to Alaska that my grandfather passed away in a tragic accident, slipping and falling in a river, and being carried away by the current. I remember finding out that he had passed and knowing that I would always regret not spending more time with him that day he and my grandma stopped by, and never getting the chance to give him one last hug, and tell him how much I loved him.

You see, my grandpa was maybe one of the coolest guys on planet earth — he was well-traveled, he’d been to places like Africa and South America, Italy and Spain, he always had a cool story to tell, or a memento of his adventures. He and my grandma loved adventures and toys — he flew planes, sailed boats, rebuilt sports cars, and would zip around their small town in Indiana on his moped or in his convertible. He loved fishing. He loved hunting. And most of all, he loved taking pictures of all of it. I remember going to my grandparents house as a kid and my grandpa getting out his picture projector so he could show us all his photos from travels abroad.

I sure loved my grandpa. He always called me “his little girlfriend” and he would take me on adventures on his moped, in his convertible, or on his plane. He smelled like leather, scotch, a fishing tackle box, and a tobacco pipe. He was so handsome.

After he passed, the only ways I could keep getting to know him was through his pictures, and stories about him. And while there were plenty of photos, I sure wished the stories were written down somewhere.

Then, after I published my book, ManifestHer, my grandma told me that she too had written something meaningful to her, a memoir of sorts, the story of how my grandparents met, fell in love, built their life together, and ultimately, her recollection of the day he passed away. It was beautiful, gut-wrenching, absolutely incredible. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to have a grandparent that cared enough to share her story that she took the time to write it all down for me. I cherished this hand-written document, so much that in order to keep it safe, I stored it away in a box of my favorite books when we moved from Chicago to St. Charles, and that’s when the most devastating thing happened. I couldn’t find it.

My heart was absolutely broken. How could I have lost the best book I’d ever read in my life???

I didn’t give up the search, and after a few months of head scratching and searching every place I could think to scour, I found it. INSTANT RELEIF washed over me. I decided then and there that some memories were too precious to only exist in the physical world, and I decided to make a digital copy of it.

Not too long after I tracked down my grandmother’s text, I went searching for the video file of our wedding video, so that I could put something nice together for Ronnie as a gift. I was stunned to find that while at least I had access to the wedding video on Vimeo, I did not have access to the actual Mp4 file, and worse, the company that filmed our wedding and made our video no longer existed. Devastated yet again, I screen-recorded our wedding video with audio to ensure that I would at least always have that as an Mp4. In this moment, I realized that some memories were just too precious to entrust others with, and I realized just how many of mine were scattered across the internet, my phone, or my social media profiles.

I started thinking about how I could bring our core memories together, up from the basement, down from the cloud, and where I could put them so I knew they’d always be safe, but also more importantly where could I put them where they wouldn’t just be “shoved in a box somewhere” whether that box was digital or physical. And that’s when the idea dawned on me. A private website to house our family’s core memories. I could put photos, videos, scrapbooks, recipes, voicemails, Charlie’s first pieces of art… All of it! All in once place, and I could make easy to navigate, searchable, and more! Wow was I excited about this.

How I did It

Over the years since building ManifestHer, I’ve become somewhat of a whiz-kid at building sites on Squarespace. I built ManifestHer, I built Allowlist, I built Mahan Family Wines, and I’ve built websites for a few other creative projects as well. I really enjoy the process of website building, it’s a creative endeavor with a really tangible result, that happens to also be both functional and beautiful.

So when I got it in my head that our family needed it’s own private website to store core memories, I already knew the features and functionality of Squarespace like the back of my hand. I knew that I could make the site private, which was super important to me from a privacy perspective, and I also knew I could leverage the Squarespace blog component as the core archive for memories, leveraging dates, tags, and categories to make it easily searchable and filterable. I started thinking through the architecture of it all — what categories would be most meaningful and what tags would I want to make sure could be leveraged. In addition to the searchable core memories, I knew I wanted to have a few major landing pages, a gorgeous home page, and a few other fun components.

Originally, I thought I would just upload videos, and photos. Then, as I got more and more into it, I realized that I could also upload voicemails from grandparents, and best friends. I realized I could store Charlie’s first pieces of art. I realized that I could use it as a digital journal writing little notes about Charlie’s first year of life, and so on and so forth. The project really took on a life of its own.

Once I had the main architecture built, I started by uploading the core memories that I knew I couldn’t leave out — our annual family Christmas cards, our annual family scrapbook, and videos of all of Charlie’s firsts (she was about 6 months when I started the project, so that made it easy to get things together).

Then, I made a commitment to myself to upload core memories every month like clockwork, so that I would never get too behind on the project, and I could always have the latest and greatest memories in my pocket for whenever I was feeling nostalgic, or missing my family when traveling for work.

Key Elements of Our Family Website:

How You Can Do It

I’ve shown a few girlfriends our family archive site, and they get really jazzed about the idea of having one for their family, until they get overwhelmed by what it would take to actually get all those core memories together so they could curate such a site! I get it, obviously because of my experiences losing my grandma’s memoir, and our wedding video, I am more sensitive than the average Jane to ensuring that our core memories are safely kept. That being said, I wanted to provide a few ideas to those of you who want to hold the vision of one day doing this kind of creative project for your own family, so here’s what I came up with:

Idea 1 — Make One Family Scrapbook

Don’t worry about committing to doing it every year for the rest of your life, just do one for last year and see if you like the result. I keep mine limited to 20 pages, and typically no more than four photos per page. This requires me to get pretty picky about what “core memories” we really made during the year, and as a result, I have a beautiful, concise, and oh so special time capsule of the year.

Idea 2 — Make One Family Newsletter

Don’t worry about committing to an annual newsletter. Just take the time to write one Word page worth of stories or memories from the last year, as if you are writing a letter to a loved one that lives halfway across the world. If this sounds like a tall task, do this, set a timer for 30 minutes and just start writing whatever comes to mind. When the 30 minutes is up, download that file as a PDF and store it in your Google Drive under the name “2024 Family Newsletter.”

Idea 3 — Make One Google Drive Folder housing Core Memories from the Last Year

Make a list of holidays, birthdays, and vacations from the last year. Go through your phone and download 1-2 photos from each of those special occasions and upload them to Google Drive in a folder “2024” or whatever the year is. Name each of the files, for example “Cabo San Lucas, 2024”

Summary

It’s so easy to get overwhelmed by trying to make up for a lifetime of not capturing these memories, it’s also so easy to guilt yourself for not living up to the standard of “nostalgic mother” or whatever that you want to be. Don’t do that. It’s okay, you are doing your best. We all are! That said, if you’re reading this article and thinking to yourself “wow, that sounds really special and I want that for my family one day” the best advice I can give you is to start small, and simple, and see where the current takes you.