So why was it built, and why was it built this way? Well, to begin with, as I’ve mentioned on the website and in other places, we tried really hard with the largest, (I won’t name names), but the largest memoir recording company that was out there.
And we just didn’t have success. My parents-in-law did. They were a bit younger than my mum, and they were able to tough it out. But I was really disappointed with how hard it was to get the book into the world. It still took them 18 months to get the story ready, and then when they got the book, there was still formatting issues that had missed.
My background is in the variable data printing space and also the web development space, so I had a pretty good handle on how easy it could be. But I was really surprised by how hard it was made.
What should have been magic started to become a chore. And that just seemed like such a shame to me.
It was the technology that was the barrier to this being easy and enjoyable. So one day I sat down with mum, and I just opened my phone and used a transcription app and started to transcribe her stories. And what a difference maker it was. Mum really started to open up.
And as an example, we had one story that was maybe 200 words long, but the question was, “what’s the most beautiful place that you’ve ever been to?” Well, 200 words just simply didn’t describe what mum had experienced, but she didn’t have it in her to continue typing.
Why didn’t you type it for her? What we found is that when my sister or me did the typing for her, she would get really frustrated because it wasn’t her voice. So I decided that transcription was the way to do it. And having seen the massive difference between mum talking into her phone and telling her story vs her trying to type it was huge. Like 1000+ word on the same story, huge. AND we got the added benefit of the voice recording, which carried all her tone and inflection.
Some of us are great writers and some of us aren’t. And mum fell into that category. But the main thing that I really noticed was that when we started asking follow up questions, our whole family really lit up. We learnt things about mum we just didn’t know, and we would never have known to ask because we didn’t know to ask about it.
We found out that she nearly ended up in an orphanage, which was just mind-blowing. We had no idea. And from these conversations, we gleaned more and more from her. The problem was that a lot of these conversations never actually ended up in the book.
And, you know, mum has 12 grandkids and all of a sudden it hit me that we were just going to be facing the same problem. Mum’s stories were now in my head and my sister’s head and my brother’s head, but were they ever going to go any further than that?
I really started to think hard about the absolute lack of knowledge that we had about any of our family. Mum’s father died really young and her mother, my Nana, was a really closed hard woman. So we never saw any of those things and we didn’t know anything about it.
So we thought we should probably put an end to that and try and build something that’s just much easier to use.
And here it is, welcome to Memory Stream.