The archive you wish you had tomorrow must be built today.

This method started with a wish: to ask Grandma how to make her pierogi — and have her answer. Not a recipe card. Her. By the time the project took shape, the window for recording her voice had closed. Her handwritten recipes survive. Her telling of them doesn't.

Every family has people whose stories, voices, and wisdom are irreplaceable — and in most families, those stories are never captured. They end when the person does. Not because recording them is hard: a phone on a stand and a Sunday afternoon is genuinely enough to begin. But because it never becomes this week's task, right up until the day it's too late to schedule at all.

What's in the starter

• The method at a glance — two tracks (a living subject you can still interview, or an artifact-only subject preserved through letters, recipes, and family memory) and the five steps from first session to finished archive.
• The subject profile worksheet — fifteen minutes that shape the whole project: who, what track, what urgency, what rich material exists, and the question your family will someday want answered.
• The first-session guide — before/during/after craft and ten warm openers, from "tell me about the house you grew up in" to "what makes you laugh every time?"

When you're ready for the whole year

The full One Thousand Stories kit is the complete method: a 23-page designed guide with the question bank across eight life periods, the archive and tagging system that keeps a thousand stories findable, an honest chapter on the AI layer (what it can and can't be, and the consent rules that keep it kind), and five worksheets — including the thousand-box Story Wall for the refrigerator — plus editable Word templates.