Our Story

In 2019 my parents had unexpected health issues. They recovered, but it shocked my sister and I who naively thought life wasn’t going to change any time soon. It reminded me of life’s fragility and the importance of family.

It exposed a long held regret that there is still much I don’t know about my parents. Their life history. Their lessons in life. Their cooking recipes and even their tips on stopping slugs from eating a crop of lettuce! I wrongly assumed I could access this precious information at any time in the future. And I wanted to fix it.

All this precious information lives in our family member’s minds. But when they go, it goes too. That thought horrified me.

I backup my documents, yet this most precious information has no backup and unless something changed, it would be lost forever.

The engineer in me was desperate to digitise and triple save this information so it can be passed on to future generations. And keep available for me, so I can relive past moments and access my family’s advice when I need it.

My parents were only part of the problem. What about my wife and I? Our lives are summarised by official documents and photos that mean little to others. I don’t want future generations to think that’s all we are.

And what about everything we’ve learned from life? Fought so hard to understand. I’d hoped to pass them on to our children and maybe even grandchildren. Do those lessons have to end with us?

It raised the question, what will be our family legacy? It’s got to be affordable, yet precious. Timeless so it’s valuable to generations who we’ll never meet. Something meaningful yet fun. Perhaps even able to help my family. No amount of money, no building, nor object can achieve all this. But the simple act of digitising our key family stories and lessons would.

Our kids are worse off. Without taking action they would lose the stories and knowledge from their parents and grandparents, and they wouldn’t have a recording of their own lives as they grew up.

What a gift it would be if they had these stories, and could connect the dots and see how they developed into the person they became. And perhaps even use the insights from family stories to guide their future actions.

Not ready to live with the regret of failure, I set about finding solutions. We wanted to do this as a family and enjoy discussing subjects we never usually cover. To grow stronger together. The journey being as important as the legacy being created.

I searched for tools that would help inspire us to write great stories. Something that allowed us to work together as a family on the stories. With options to attach photos, videos and audio files. And with sophisticated tools to search, cross link stories, tag people and so on.

Existing services didn’t meet our needs, so we set about creating such a service that would be valuable to families far beyond our own.

We named it Simirity, inspired by the 2,000 year old ‘Smriti’ texts that preserved stories of life back then.