Why this exists

About

This started as one family's problem and turned into a set of objects. There is a company behind it now — KeepsakeKit.com is a trade name of Wire Briar LLC — but nothing is sold yet, and it may never be more than a thing one family made for itself.

The problem

A person is mostly undocumented. We have photographs of nearly everyone and almost nothing else — not their handwriting, not how they signed their name, not the things they always said, not the answer to any question nobody thought to ask. Photographs record what someone looked like, which turns out to be the part you remember anyway.

Why it is aimed at healthy people

Almost everything in this field is sold to the grieving or the dying, at the worst possible moment and usually at the worst possible price. This is built for people who are fine, who have time, and who will enjoy doing it — because the answers only exist while the person does, and a book of questions is a pleasant thing to fill in over a year and an unbearable thing to fill in over a weekend.

What it is not

It is not a funeral product, not a genealogy service, and not a subscription. It produces no digital files — there is no drive to maintain, no account to keep alive, and nothing that stops working when a company does. Paper is the archive; scanning is somebody else's job.

Who is doing it

A family admin sets it up. One person works out what to order, gets the kits to the people who want them, keeps the register of who has what, and looks after the cabinet. That part does not scale by itself and somebody has to hold it.

But nobody can do your part for you. You write your own Umm Book, in your handwriting, in your words. You collect your own fingerprints and your own hair and your own signature. The whole point is that it is you — a book filled in on your behalf is a book about what somebody else remembered, which is the thing this exists to stop happening.

One person, for an extended family of about a hundred, working through it in the open. Everything on this site is provisional and most of it has been argued about at least twice.