AI For Family & Legacy: The Stories That Deserve To Outlive Us

AI For Real Life Series — Part 2 of 6

Hey there…

This week we’re going somewhere deeper… Your family. Your stories. Your legacy.

My grandmother kept diaries for decades. And here’s the thing about my grandmother… She knew shorthand.

Every now and then… usually when my grandfather was in trouble… the handwriting would shift to shorthand. She didn’t want anyone to know what she was saying in those moments.

My grandfather wasn’t always a well-behaved man. But my grandmother wasn’t always an angel in sneakers either… 😄

Those diaries sat in a hope chest for years after she was gone. My mom knew shorthand, but it was a different kind so she couldn’t translate them either. So the shorthand sections stayed locked away because nobody knew how to read them.

Until now.

AI can help transcribe handwritten shorthand… even from that era… Gregg… Pitman… personal variations that developed over decades of use…

I think the people who loved her deserve to finally know.

I also have old projector film reels. Home movies from when I was very little. Before my parents divorced. Before everything changed.

Little kid Deb on film… 😄

Those reels can be digitized. And once they’re digital… AI can help organize them… catalog them… create something meaningful from the raw footage.

Something my son can watch someday.

When my mom turned fifty I gave her a diary. I asked her to fill it with stories I didn’t know about her life before she had me.

She never filled it.

Her childhood was difficult. And then she was gone… and the diary was empty… and those stories went with her.

But not all of them. Because I remember what she told me. And now I can sit down… tell those fragments out loud… and AI can help me organize them into something coherent. Something my son can read someday.

My son is now forty years old. He has CRPS, PTSD and a TBI. The medications that help him manage his conditions have cost him many of his childhood memories.

So I’m building something for him.

Stories. Videos. Memories from his childhood and mine. AI helps me organize those stories into something coherent. Helps me turn random memory fragments and voice memos into something he can actually sit down and read or watch someday.

We sign I love you to each other. We’ve done that since he was little because I had a lot of deaf friends and was studying to be a deaf education teacher. We created a whole phrase in sign language that means I love you more than anything or anyone in the whole wide world and back again.

I wrote it on a note and taped it to his bathroom mirror one day. It’s still there.

AI isn’t going to capture that moment. But it can help me make sure he never loses it either.

Your life is a book. You just have to tell your stories. One at a time. Out loud if that’s easier. And AI helps you organize them into something that actually reads like a life.

Your autobiography doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to exist.

Pick one thing. One story to tell out loud into your phone. Because the time to do that is always now. Before it’s too late and those stories get lost forever.

Next week we’re diving into AI for your Creative Life… Subscribe to the blog so you don’t miss it!!

Hey thanks for stopping by and checking us out… we appreciate it… Later!!