Every family
has a story.

Read Along

Long before The Branch had a name, there was a family tree assignment, a little tape recorder, and my grandfather. I was young when I completed my first real family history project. And even then, there was something about knowing where I came from that fascinated me. I didn’t just want names on a tree. I wanted to know who these people were. What their lives had been like. What they remembered.

So I did something that, at the time, felt pretty simple. I sat down with my grandfather and asked him questions. And I recorded him. I can still remember having that little tape. His voice was there—telling me pieces of our family story in the way only he could tell them.

At that age, I don’t think I fully understood what I had. It was a school project. It was an interview with my grandfather. It was something I was curious about. I didn’t yet understand that one day I would want those few recorded minutes back more than I could have imagined. Somewhere along the way, that tape was lost. And as I got older—and became more serious about researching my family history—I thought about it more and more.

Because I could remember pieces of what he told me. But remembering what someone said and hearing them say it are two very different things. I wanted his voice. I wanted the pauses. The expressions. The way he pronounced certain words. The little details that never make it onto a family tree. And I couldn’t get them back.

That loss changed the way I think about family history. Because our stories don’t only live in birth certificates, census records, marriage licenses, and photographs. They live in voices. They live in the stories somebody tells every Thanksgiving. The joke everybody in the family knows. The recipe nobody ever wrote down. The nickname nobody remembers how somebody got. The story your grandmother has told so many times that you think you’ll never forget it. Until one day, you realize you might.

And that’s really where The Branch comes from. I wanted to create ways for families to ask the questions while they still can. To sit around a table and tell the stories. To record the voices. To preserve the photographs. To find the records. And to give the people who come after us more than a list of names and dates.

I want them to know something about the people those names belonged to. What made them laugh. What they survived. What they built. What they loved. What they dreamed about. How they became us.

I can’t recover that tape of my grandfather. And I can’t go back and ask him all the questions I know to ask now. But I can make sure that loss taught me something. Ask now. Listen now. Record it now. Write it down. Save the photograph. Tell the story again.

Because the things that feel ordinary while we’re living them can become priceless when they’re all we have left. That is why I created The Branch.

The tape is gone. The story isn’t.