Stories
One person remembers a life in outline. A brother, a neighbour, a friend from work — together they remember it in detail. This is what families find when they remember someone together.
Our family
We built Recollective because of memories in our own family we nearly lost — the ones that lived in one person's head, and nowhere else. When we started asking our relatives the same questions, the answers didn't match. They added up.
The stories we thought we knew turned out to be several stories, told from different rooms.
Three brothers, their parents, and the relatives who filled in the rest
Read our storyThese are the kinds of things that surface when people remember together — the ones no single person would have uncovered alone.
Example
A name turns up in four different memories, told by four people who never compared notes. Nobody had realised how much of the story ran through them.
Example
The same kitchen, the same summer, two entirely different feelings about it. Both are true, and together they say more than either one.
Example
Someone posts an old picture without much to say about it. An hour later a cousin explains what was happening that day.
Example
The person their family knew at home and the person their oldest friend knew at nineteen are recognisably the same, and not the same at all.
Example
Something the family has done every year for decades started for a reason only one person still remembers.
A daughter, a younger brother, a partner, a colleague, a neighbour of forty years — each of them knows a different part of the same life. Recollective is built so all of them can add what only they remember.
Example
A daughter
She remembers the hospital corridor, and how her mother refused the wheelchair.
A younger brother
He remembers the same week entirely differently — from the back seat of a car.
A neighbour of forty years
She remembers the part of him the family never saw, because it happened over a fence.
Someone she worked with
He remembers her being the first one in the building, every morning, for nineteen years.
Nobody has to write a life story. One person adds one thing they remember, and it gives everyone else something to remember against.
Example
1 · One memory
Not the biography. A green thermos by the door, filled the night before.
2 · Another person remembers
A sibling remembers the dent in it, and why nobody was allowed to replace it.
3 · The story deepens
Between them the family has the walk to work, the early mornings, and the reason for both.
Add an old picture and someone will tell you where it was taken. Someone else will tell you what happened afterwards. The photograph stops being an image and becomes the beginning of a story.
From our own family archive
Everything a family gathers — the memories, the photographs, the voices that disagree — can be written into one finished Book. Gathering is free. The Book is $795.
From an example Book
Chapter II
Martin's account is that his father sold the garage because the big place opened on the bypass. Martin is certain of it.
Fiona's view is that he sold it because his back had gone and he would not admit it. For Fiona, the bypass had nothing to do with it.
Martin thinks he was relieved to be out of it. Martin says Fiona thinks he was heartbroken.
Ask one person one question. That's usually all it takes for the rest of the family to start remembering.