Story Through Time

A little moment. A whole life.

Every life has a story. Tell yours through time.

Story Through Time keeps the memories, people and places that made you — written in your own words, on the dates you actually remember.

Start your story See an example timeline

Private by default. Nothing you write is shared with anyone unless you decide to share it, and you can take it back.

How it works

Start anywhere. Not at the beginning.

Nobody remembers their life in order, so nothing here asks you to. Write one memory. Then another, whenever one turns up.

Write a memory

A few lines or a few pages. Your words are kept exactly as you wrote them, and every version you save is preserved — nothing overwrites what you said before.

Date it however you can

An exact day, a season, a decade, or how old you were. “The summer I turned nine” is a real answer, and it lands in the right place on your timeline.

See it in order

Your timeline runs newest first and moves down towards the earliest. Search what you wrote, or narrow it to one person, one place, one chapter.

An example timeline

Fictional, and about as messy as real life.

  1. 2004 about

    Moving day

    in The house on Bell Street

    The van wouldn’t start. We ate chips on the floor of an empty kitchen and agreed it was the best meal any of us had had.

    MumBell Street#firsts

  2. the summer I turned nine about

    The summer of the flood

    in The house on Bell Street

    The water came up past the third step. We slept upstairs for a week and the whole house smelled of river.

  3. 1977-06-03

    Born

    A date that comes round every year

All fictional. Real memories are never used to advertise anything.

Dates

“Sometime in the eighties” is a real date.

Most products make you pick a day you never knew. This one records the date the way you remember it — and keeps your wording alongside, so the timeline shows what you said rather than what a database needed.

Nine ways to say when

An exact day, a month, a year, a season, a decade, a span between two dates, how old you were, or simply that you are not sure.

Certainty is recorded too

“3 June 1998, I think” is exact and uncertain at the same time. Both are kept, and a rough date is never shown as though it were precise.

Your age becomes a date

Tell it when you were born and “the summer I turned nine” takes its proper place, marked as approximate — because it is.

Sharing

Nothing is shared until you say so.

A link, for people with no account

Show one memory or a whole story to a relative who will never sign up. The link is revocable, can expire, and never serves your original photographs.

Connections, by invitation only

There is no way to search for a person here. You reach someone by sending them a link — a directory of who keeps their memories with us is not something we are willing to have.

Hearts and comments, if you want them

Switch them off for a memory and the server refuses them, not just the page. Blocking someone revokes what they could already see, in both directions.

Optional help

The Story Guide asks questions. It never writes your life.

Assistance is off until you switch it on, and it can never change a word you wrote. Anything it suggests is a proposal you accept or dismiss, and accepting keeps the version you had before.

When you ask for help with a memory, that one memory is what gets sent — its title, its date in your words, and what you have written. Not your other memories, not your photographs, and nothing that says who you are.

Privacy

Private by construction, not by policy.

Take everything with you

One file with every story, every version you ever saved, and every photograph exactly as you uploaded it. Nothing in it needs this product to open.

Deletion that means it

Asking stops every share and signs you out everywhere immediately. Your writing is erased thirty days later, so a change of heart an hour from now still finds it.

An email address is not a key

Accounts are told apart by the provider that vouched for you. Signing in a different way with the same address makes a different account — on purpose.

Free resources

Everything below is free, and needs no account.

Prompts, interview guides, and plain advice on photographs, dates and digital preservation. It works with a notebook and a shoebox as well as it works with any software — including ours.

If you don’t know where to begin

Ten prompts that usually work.

The problem everyone hits

What to do when you can’t remember the date.

Write the date you actually have

“Summer of 1998” is a real date. So is “the year we moved” and “sometime in my twenties”. Recording it vaguely and truthfully beats inventing a precise day that never happened.

Anchor it to something else

You may not recall the year, but you may recall the car, the house, the job, or how old a child was. Anchors like these usually narrow a memory to within a year or two.

Say when you are unsure

Mark the difference between what you know and what you are reconstructing. Whoever reads this later — including you — will want to know which is which.

Interview guides

How to ask a parent or grandparent.

Most family interviews fail the same way: someone points a phone at a relative and asks them to “talk about their life”. It is far too large a question, and the usual answer is a polite summary of things you already know.

Ask about one thing

“What was your kitchen like?” gets a better answer than “what was your childhood like?”. Small, concrete questions produce specific memories; large ones produce headlines.

Let silence do the work

After an answer, wait. The second thing someone says is usually the one they had to think about, and it is usually the one worth keeping.

Record, and take a note of the date

A phone recording is fine. Write down when you recorded it and who is speaking — in twenty years that note will be worth as much as the audio.

Stop when they want to stop

An hour is a lot. Two shorter conversations are usually better than one long one, and a person who enjoyed the first will agree to a second.

Fifteen questions to bring with you

That last one is the most productive question on the list, and it belongs at the end of every interview.

Photographs

Scanning, labelling, and what to do first.

Label before you scan

The most valuable thing about an old photograph is usually who is in it, and that information exists only in the head of whoever is still alive to say. Ask first; scan afterwards.

Scan at 600 dpi, keep the original file

600 dpi is enough to reprint a standard photograph at its original size. Keep whatever the scanner produced, untouched, and edit copies — a cleaned-up version is not a replacement for the scan.

Write the names into the file

A caption typed beside a photograph in one app is lost when you leave that app. A caption written into the file’s own metadata, or into a plain text file beside it, travels with the picture.

Photograph what you cannot scan

Albums with stuck-down pages, framed portraits, objects, houses, gravestones. A phone photograph in daylight is far better than nothing and takes a minute.

Digital preservation

What actually survives.

Digital material does not decay gently the way paper does. It is either perfectly readable or completely gone, and the difference is usually whether somebody kept more than one copy.

Three copies, two places

The copy on your computer, a copy on a drive you keep elsewhere, and a copy somewhere online. A backup in the same room as the original is one flood from being no backup.

Boring formats last longest

Plain text, PDF, JPEG, PNG, WAV, MP4. A proprietary format from an app that no longer exists is a file nobody can open, however carefully it was stored.

Check it every year

Open a few files at random. Silent corruption and drives that quietly stopped mounting are both common, and both are only discoverable by looking.

Leave instructions

Where the material is, how to get into it, and who should have it. Digital inheritance fails far more often through a missing password than through a missing file.

AI and storytelling

Useful for questions. Dangerous for answers.

A language model is good at asking what you have left out and poor at knowing anything about your life. Used for the first it is a decent interviewer; used for the second it invents plausible detail, which in a family history is indistinguishable from a lie told confidently.

Keep the original

Whatever you accept from a tool, keep the version you actually wrote. The unedited draft is the historical record; the tidy one is a convenience.

Never let it supply facts

Dates, names, places and events must come from a person or a document. A model filling a gap is not remembering — it is guessing, and it will not tell you which.

Mind what you send

Text sent to a service leaves your control. Before pasting a family memory anywhere, it is worth knowing where it goes and what is kept.

This is opinion rather than fact, and it is ours: the useful question is “what have I forgotten to write down?”, not “write my life story”.

Keeping what you write

Your first draft is the valuable one.

Don’t tidy the voice out of it. The half-finished sentence, the detail that seems irrelevant, the aside about the weather — those are the parts that will sound like you in thirty years. Edit for clarity, never for polish.

Keep a copy somewhere you control, in a format you can still open later. Plain text and original photographs outlive every app, including this one.

Questions

The ones worth asking.

What does it cost?

Nothing today. There are no paid plans, no trial, and no card to enter. If that ever changes it will be said plainly here first, and what you have written will remain yours to export either way.

Is my writing used to train anything?

No. Assistance is off unless you switch it on, and even then only the one memory you asked about is sent.

What if I don’t remember the date?

Then say so. “I’m not sure” is a supported answer and the memory still keeps its place on your timeline, at the end where the undated ones sit.

Can I get my writing out?

At any time, in one download, with the originals of every photograph. No request, no waiting, no conversation about it.

One memory is a beginning.

You do not owe anyone the whole of your life. Start with whatever you thought of while reading this.

Start your story Or start with a prompt