The biggest misconception about starting a family archive is that you need to digitize everything first.

You don't.

Before scanning a single photo, take a breath and do this instead:

• •Check your phone's photo library
• •Look at your laptop folders
• •Search your email for attachments from relatives
• •Think about texts, voicemails, and shared Google Drives
• •Remember the PDFs you downloaded years ago and forgot about

Once people actually look, they're often surprised by how much family history is already digital — it's just scattered.

The hardest part isn't digitization. It's not having a single place to put things once you find them.

Having a central home changes everything. It turns "random files" into the beginnings of an archive.

Professional archivists think about climate control, file formats, and redundancy because they work at institutional scale. Families don't need to start there.

What families need first is:

• ✓A place that feels safe
• ✓A place that's private
• ✓A place that's easy to use
• ✓A place designed to last

The goal isn't archival perfection — it's continuity.

If your archive helps:

• Your kids understand who came before them
• Your siblings finally see the same photos
• Your family stop losing history every time a phone breaks

Then it's already doing important work.

One of the most freeing principles from ethnography is this: meaning emerges over time.

You don't need perfect labels, folders, or timelines to begin. Start by gathering.

Upload:

• Photos, even if you don't know who everyone is yet
• Documents, even if you haven't read them closely
• Letters, even if they're messy
• Audio, even if it's unedited
• Stories, even if they're incomplete

Once everything is in one place, patterns appear naturally. Faces repeat. Names come back. Dates start to anchor themselves.

Trying to fully organize before you gather usually stops people cold. Gathering first builds momentum — and momentum is what sustains long-term projects.

A photo without context fades faster than a blurry photo with a story.

You don't need formal interviews or polished narratives. Start small:

• A couple sentences explaining why a photo matters
• A note about who always hosted holidays
• A voice memo capturing a memory before it disappears
• A comment correcting or adding to someone else's recollection

Ethnographers care deeply about this kind of everyday storytelling, because it preserves how people understood their lives, not just what happened.

Future generations won't be grateful for perfect scans. They'll be grateful for voice, texture, and meaning.

Family archives work best when they're shared — but only at the pace people are comfortable with.

You don't need everyone onboard immediately.

Start with:

• One sibling
• One parent
• One cousin who cares about history

As others see the archive taking shape, curiosity usually follows. The presence of a shared space — rather than one person "being in charge of everything" — makes participation feel safer and more collaborative.

If you're reading this and thinking, "I just want one safe place to put everything so it doesn't keep slipping through the cracks," you're not alone.

That exact feeling is why Heritable exists.

Heritable was purpose-built for families who want to preserve and clarify their multi-generational story — without turning it into a public genealogy project, a social network, or a mess of folders that only one person understands.

We built it around a few simple beliefs:

• •Family history should belong to the family, not advertisers or algorithms
• •You should be able to gather photos, videos, documents, and stories in one shared place
• •Context matters as much as content
• •You shouldn't have to "do it perfectly" to do it meaningfully
• •And your family's archive should still make sense long after you're no longer the one organizing it

Heritable isn't about performing history. It's about giving it a stable home.

If you already have photos on your phone, documents on your laptop, or emails from relatives sitting in your inbox — you're already most of the way there. Heritable gives those scattered pieces somewhere to land, so they can start becoming a story instead of a pile.

A digital family archive is never done. And that's a feature, not a flaw.

New photos appear. New stories surface. Perspectives change. Children grow old enough to ask questions.

The most successful archives aren't the most complete ones. They're the ones that lasted.

If you start today with a handful of photos and a few stories, you're already doing something profound: interrupting the quiet, constant loss of family memory.