For families
When the person who knew everyone in the pictures is gone, an album becomes a box of strangers. We come to the house, sit down with whoever still remembers, and write it down while it can still be asked.
Why it matters
Who is that, in the hat, at the lake? The photograph survived. The answer did not.
Every family has a container of photographs, certificates, letters and paperwork that only one or two people can actually explain. While those people are here, the box is an archive. After they are gone, it is a pile of images of strangers, and no amount of scanning fixes that.
Most digitizing services solve the wrong half of the problem. They will return a folder of high-resolution files named IMG_0417. The pixels are safe and the knowledge is still gone.
The names, dates, places and stories are the part that expires. We treat those as the deliverable, and the scan as the thing that carries them.
What we do
01
We digitize photographs, letters, certificates and paperwork at your kitchen table. Each item is labelled with what your family remembers about it — who is in it, roughly when, where it was taken — recorded while there is still someone to ask.
02
When a home is being sold, cleared or handed on, we document the property itself and its contents — room by room, with photographs and a written record. Useful for executors, for dividing belongings, and for insurance.
See how we document propertyMost families start with the photographs, because that is the part with a deadline.
How it works
Nothing is mailed and nothing is dropped off. We work at the house, at whatever pace suits the person we are sitting with. If that means a shorter session and a second visit, that is fine.
Your originals never leave your house. They are photographed or scanned where they sit, handled as little as possible, and put back where they came from.
This is the actual work. We go through the material with your family and record what is known about each item — names, approximate dates, places, relationships, and the story if there is one.
You receive the files and the written record, organised and searchable. We then delete our working copy. What we hold afterwards is nothing.
How we handle uncertainty
“About 1953, Aunt Ruth thinks” is a more useful record than “1953”.
When your aunt says a photograph is from around 1953, we write down that she said it, and that she was not certain. We do not quietly convert a recollection into a fact.
This matters more than it sounds. Families build genealogies, settle disputes and make decisions on these records for decades afterward. A date that was always a guess should still look like a guess in twenty years.
Where something can be corroborated — a date stamped on the print, a name written on the back, a document that confirms it — we note that too, and say which it was.
What it costs
This work is charged for the time it takes, because there is no honest way to price a box nobody has opened yet. Some families have three albums and a folder of certificates. Some have forty years in a closet.
We will look at what you have, tell you what a session is likely to cost and roughly how many it will take, and you decide from there. If the honest answer is that you do not need us — that the collection is small enough to do yourself — that is the answer you will get.
Privacy
A box of family documents can hold medical records, wills, financial statements and identity documents. We treat all of it as yours: digitized at your house, delivered to you, and our working copy deleted afterward. We do not sell, share or train anything on your family's material.
Next step
Roughly how much there is, whose it is, and whether there is someone we should sit with sooner rather than later. We will tell you what it would take.