We are changing the culture of memory

One photograph of my great-grandfather survives in our family album. A small one, 3×4, cut from some document. No wedding, no children in his arms — just a serious face for a passport. We are building E-Memory so that more than passport photos is left of the people we love. We build it in the evenings and at night, after our day jobs, so whatever your donation does not cover in costs is coffee for the team.

When I was a child my grandfather recorded our family dinners on a "Vesna" tape deck. On it he sings "Nich yaka misyachna" while my grandmother laughs somewhere off to the side. The tape was chewed up long ago and the deck is gone. If a tape like that, with the voices of your own family, is lying around somewhere, support us with a donation. It lets three more families keep those voices — not on film that stretches and snaps, but in a durable digital archive.

When my grandmother died we cleared out her display cabinet. Nobody took the crystal she had saved for holidays for forty years. But behind the glass, between the glasses, stood our photographs. She put them there so everyone would see: me at graduation, my mother still young, my grandfather in uniform. I took those photos and I keep them still — though I notice they fade a little more each year. If there was a cabinet like that in your home too, support us with a donation.