One question a week. Their voice, kept.

Everybody means to record their grandparents. Almost nobody does, because the task is enormous. This makes it small enough to actually do.

Get it on Google Play

This week

What did your house smell like when you came home from school?

Hand the phone over. One screen, one button, no menus and no way to lose anything. They talk for as long as they want, up to half an hour, and the answer is kept in the voice that said it.

Three hundred questions, written by hand

Not scraped from a list. Seven packs, so the questions fit the life rather than a template, and the engine leans toward subjects the archive has already touched.

The long life

Questions that work for anyone, anywhere. Always on.

Before the wireless

Rationing, coal light, telegrams. For elders born before about 1945.

The first television

Records, factories, the first family car. Roughly 1945 to 1968.

India and South Asia

Monsoon roofs, steel trunks, the corner shop that kept a book of credit.

Britain and Ireland

Washing day, the coalman, the front room kept for visitors.

United States and Canada

Porches, county fairs, the drive that took a whole day.

Leaving and arriving

For anyone who built a life in a country they were not born in.

What it looks like

A recording in progress: a ring being cut into a disc, with the running time below it. — Recording. The voice cuts a ring as it goes, one turn a minute. Pause, resume, or start again.

The archive: answers listed with their questions and dates. — The archive. Every answer kept with the question that produced it.

The keepsake screen: the archive drawn as a disc of rings, one for every story. — Keepsake. One ring for every story kept, and the way to get them off this phone.

On this phone, and nowhere else

No cloud to trust

Heirloom does not request the internet permission, so it cannot upload your family's voices even if it wanted to. No account, no analytics, and no transcription service listening in. You can check that on the Play listing.

So keep a copy

That also means the app is not a backup. Export the whole archive as audio files with a readable manifest of who said what and when, and put it somewhere safe. A new phone can restore that same file, and the stories come back with their tags, their marked moments and their dates.