Hystorie interviews someone in your family, one question at a time, and keeps their answers word for word. What you end up with is a private archive you can share with whoever you choose, print as a book, and keep for up to a hundred years. Start free — no account, no card. Or build your family tree first, which is free and takes minutes.
Begin anywhere
Real ones, in the words they were told to us in. You will have your own by the end of this list.
Add the people you would name without thinking — parents, grandparents, the aunt everyone has a story about — and they place themselves by generation as you type. It is free, there is no signup, and it takes a few minutes.
Then Hystorie starts asking about the people in it, which is the part a tree of names and dates can never do on its own.
One
A question at a time, out loud or on screen. Never a blank page — a blank page is where memoirs go to die.
Two
Every follow-up comes from what was just said. Mention a shed and it will ask who was in it.
Three
Their words, not a tidied-up version. Nothing is invented, summarised or improved on their behalf.
Takes about fifteen seconds. No account until you want one.
Doing it yourself? Every question it asks is published here, free, and it prints.
Every question and answer, in order, in their words. Nobody can open it until you send them the link — and you can name family as keepers so it is never one person holding the only copy.
Set as a proper book — right measure, no widows, plates at the back — and printable or saveable as a PDF at any time. Free on every plan, including the free one. If we ever disappeared, you would still have it.
Built from the answers themselves. Everyone named in a memory, with the relationship your family actually used, placed by generation — and tapping any of them shows the memories they are in. Free on every plan, including the free one.
Answers can be spoken rather than typed — press record, hand over the phone, and the recording is kept beside the words, which are written out so the archive can still be read and printed. Everything else in here could in principle be written down by somebody else later. That could not.
Faces, houses, weddings, documents. Photographs are resized on your own device before they are uploaded, so they stay sharp enough to print without being a burden to keep.
At the end of a term the archive is sealed: nothing more can be added, and it stays readable by anyone with the link. What is in it then is fixed — no later hand can tidy it, edit it, or quietly improve on what was actually said.
Reaching a limit stops you adding. It never takes anything away, never hides what you have already kept, and never expires a link somebody was sent years ago.
Free
100 questions, 20 photographs and 30 minutes of voice. Yours to read, share and print, forever. Nothing expires.
From €39, once
Keep adding for five years, or fifty, or a hundred and then sealed. There is no subscription — nothing renews, nothing lapses, and nothing is ever lost because a card expired. €399 for the longest.
The interviewer is. It chooses what to ask and what to follow up on, and it gets better at it the more the archive holds. It does not write the answers, tidy them, summarise them or improve them. What is kept is what was said.
Nobody, until you send them the link. You can name other people as keepers so the archive does not depend on one person, and you can remove them again.
Yes, and it is one of the reasons this exists. Everyone who knew them answers what they remember, and it is gathered into one archive rather than scattered across a family. There is also help writing a death notice and an obituary when that is what the week calls for.
Yes, and it is free on every plan. You do not type it in — it is built from the interview itself, using the people already named in the answers and the relationships your family actually used. You only correct what is wrong. Tap anyone in it and you get the memories that mention them, which is the only way to read an archive by person rather than by date.
Every archive prints or saves as a PDF at any time, on any plan, free. There is also a one-click download of everything held — every question and answer word for word, the family tree, and your photographs and recordings — as a plain file that will open long after any of this is gone. We would rather say that plainly than have you discover you needed it.
Yes, yourself, in two taps, and it means it: the memories, the photographs, the recordings, the tree, and every link you have sent anybody. Take a copy first — we cannot get it back for you afterwards.
Not to start. Answer a question and see what it asks next. An account only matters when you want the archive to be findable again from another device.
No. There is a free tier and there are one-off payments, and that is all. Nothing renews, nothing lapses, and no archive is ever lost because a card expired — which matters more here than in most products, since the thing you most want kept is the thing most likely to be forgotten about after a bereavement.
The archive is sealed. Nothing more can be added, and everything in it stays readable, shareable and printable at the same link, for good. What is in it then is fixed, which is the point — no later hand can edit or tidy what your family actually said.
Picked for what you just worked out — not a list of everything we make.