Family Memory Books

Every family keeps things. Recipes on index cards in a handwriting you would know anywhere. The story about the Christmas the power went out. Birthdays, anniversaries, the way your family does things that no other family does quite the same way.

Family memory books are for the parts that live in people's heads rather than in photographs. Written down, they survive. Left alone, they last exactly one generation.

What is a family memory book?

A prompted journal that holds a family's shared history rather than one person's. Ours cover different territory: Family Recipes for the food and who taught you to make it, Celebrate for birthdays and milestones across the years, and the Christmas Memory Book for the one day a year everything is different — with room for fifty of them.

Who should write in it?

More people than you would think. The best ones are not written by one person — they collect handwriting. Grandparents remember what nobody else does, and our Grandparents Journals give them their own. Children write in them badly and that turns out to be the point.

How do I actually keep it going?

Tie it to something that already happens. Recipes get written the day you cook them. Christmas gets written on Boxing Day while it is fresh. Birthdays get a page each. Nobody sustains a habit that needs remembering — attach it to an occasion and it looks after itself.

What about the photographs?

Those want their own home. Our Big Book of Adventures holds the everyday family photographs, and the Bespoke Keepsake Album & Box pairs an album with a linen box for the loose pieces — tickets, cards, the things that do not fit on a page.

Are they a good gift?

They are the gift for someone who has everything, because they are not really an object — they are a prompt to record something that will otherwise be lost. Personalised in gold foil, made in linen, and built to be handed on.