A quiet app for family stories

There’s a moment, usually in a kitchen, when someone starts with “you probably don’t remember this…”

Family Museum is a private archive of the voices who raised you. Record a story. We transcribe it on your phone, never on our servers. The archive remembers — so the rest of you can just listen.

DOWNLOAD ON THEApp Store
See how it works
THURSDAY, MARCH 12
The Archive
Your family, gathered.
Ask the archive…
Ask
47
STORIES
12
VOICES
3h
RECORDED
RECENTLY GATHERED
NR
The kitchen at Nana's
Nana Rose · 1963 · 3:42
You probably don't remember this, but your grandfather kept a jar of lemon drops…
DJ
Crossing at Ellis
Dada Joseph · 1928 · 5:18
My mother held my hand so tight. I remember looking up…
RECORD
A voice you love
TRANSCRIBE
On device, always
REMEMBER
Ask the archive
KEEP
In your iCloud
Why this, why now

Most families have nothing
of their grandmother’s voice.

A few photographs. Some handwriting on the backs of cards. Maybe a video at a wedding where she’s not really speaking.

The way she said your name, the story she always told about her mother’s house, the sound of her laugh — those go with her. They do not survive on their own.

This is the app for keeping them.

How it works

Three gestures. One lifetime remembered.

01
RECORD

Press record.

A relative starts a story. You press record. Your phone listens — and so does the archive, for the first time.

Cancel
● LIVE
RECORDING NANA ROSE
Let them talk.
TRANSCRIPT
“You probably don’t remember this, but your grandfather kept a jar of lemon drops on the top shelf — right above the flour tin…”
00:42
Discard
Save
02
TRANSCRIBE

Their words, on your phone.

Speech becomes text right on your device, with speaker labels. Nothing is sent anywhere. Watch the transcript appear, word by word.

THURSDAY, MARCH 12
The Archive
Your family, gathered.
Ask the archive…
Ask
47
STORIES
12
VOICES
3h
RECORDED
RECENTLY GATHERED
NR
The kitchen at Nana's
Nana Rose · 1963 · 3:42
You probably don't remember this, but your grandfather kept a jar of lemon drops…
DJ
Crossing at Ellis
Dada Joseph · 1928 · 5:18
My mother held my hand so tight. I remember looking up…
03
REMEMBER

Ask the archive anything.

Where does Nana talk about the kitchen? What did Papa say about the war? Answers cite the recordings — and the exact moment inside them.

ASK THE ARCHIVE
Your family,
in their own words.
What happened in the kitchen?
Ask
ANSWER
Three stories in the archive take place in the kitchen — all of them Nana Rose’s.
A jar of lemon drops on the top shelf, Sunday gnocchi at the long table, the afternoon your mother learned to make coffee.
FROM THESE STORIES
NR
The kitchen at Nana's
Nana Rose · 1963
The archive, by who it’s for

Some stories are for everyone.
Some are for the inner circle.
Some are just for you.

Family Museum lets you mark every story with one of three rings of trust — before you press record. It changes who can listen. And it changes how the app helps you.

RING ONE

Family

For the whole tree.

Visible to every family member you've invited. The app helps you label speakers, places, and dates with a small AI we built carefully. We'll show you what it sees.

RING TWO

Close Family

For the people on your list.

Visible only to the family members you've named as close. The app still helps with labels — but only the model on your iPhone runs. Nothing about these stories goes to any server, ever.

RING THREE

Just Me

For your eyes only.

Visible to nobody but you and the person who recorded it. The app makes no guesses, sends no requests, asks no help. The recording, the transcript, the people in it — all of it stays in your own private iCloud, never touching a server we run.

Admins of the family — usually a grown child managing the archive — can see thata private story exists. They cannot see what’s in it. Not the title, not the transcript, not the audio. Privacy that admins can see through isn’t privacy.

The archive, unpacked

Three ways to wander
through a family.

TREE

The people, grouped by generation.

Great-grandparents up top. You and yours at the base. Everyone in between remembered by name, by voice, by story count.

THE PEOPLE WHO RAISED YOU
The tree
PARENTS & SIBLINGS
NR
Nana Rose
1932– · 14 stories
CONTRIBUTOR
PV
Papa Vince
1929–2019 · 7 stories
Memorial
AM
Aunt Miriam
1935– · 6 stories
LISTENER
UR
Uncle Rafe
1938– · 3 stories
PENDING
TIMELINE

A lifetime scrolled as years.

Every story lands on a year. Scrub the decades. 1928, 1963, 1974 — the archive is a history of a family in its own words.

TWO CENTURIES, ONE FAMILY
Timeline
1928
DJ
Crossing at Ellis
Dada Joseph
1963
NR
The kitchen at Nana's
Nana Rose
1974
AM
The summer porch
Aunt Miriam
ASK

Natural-language search, cited.

"What stories happen in the kitchen?" The archive answers — and points you back to the exact thirty seconds of recording.

ASK THE ARCHIVE
Your family,
in their own words.
What happened in the kitchen?
Ask
ANSWER
Three stories in the archive take place in the kitchen — all of them Nana Rose’s.
A jar of lemon drops on the top shelf, Sunday gnocchi at the long table, the afternoon your mother learned to make coffee.
FROM THESE STORIES
NR
The kitchen at Nana's
Nana Rose · 1963
What we hold. What we don’t.

We hold less of your family
than any other place this could live.

Audio never leaves your phone. Ever. Captions and speaker labels are written by your iPhone, not by us.

When a story is in the open ring — Family — a small AI helps us pull names and dates out of the transcript. That is the one place our servers touch your story, and it is the one place you can turn off in Settings.

Voice models — the way the app learns who sounds like Nana — live in the Secure Enclave on your phone, the same silicon that guards your Face ID. They never leave the device.

When you invite the family in, the archive moves through Apple’s iCloud share — not through us. Your sister taps a link on her iPhone, the share opens in her copy of Family Museum, and she sees the stories you chose to share with her. Stop sharing any time; her access ends with the tap.

We do not train on your family.
Ever. Full stop.

NR
NANA ROSE · RECORDED MAR 12 · 3:42
“You probably don’t remember this, but your grandfather kept a jar of lemon drops on the top shelf — right above the flour tin. He would lift me up when your mother wasn’t looking. There was always flour on his hands. Always.”
1:03 / 3:42
📍 Brooklyn, NY
1963
Kitchen
Grandfather
Lemon drops
Pricing

Simple, like a library card.

Free for anyone who just wants to listen. If you’re the one doing the recording, a small subscription keeps us independent — and keeps your family’s voices out of someone else’s training data.

LISTENER
Free
forever

Listen to recordings shared with you. Browse your family tree. Read transcripts.

  • Access shared archives
  • Full transcripts
  • Family tree & timeline
  • Listen on any iPhone
MOST FAMILIES
CONTRIBUTOR
$79.99
per year

Record your own stories. Everything a family needs to begin the archive.

  • Unlimited recording
  • On-device transcription
  • Three rings of trust
  • Ask the archive, with citations
  • Share with up to 8 family members
  • 7-day free trial · save 33%
Questions

The ones
people ask.

Inside your own iCloud account, protected by Apple's end-to-end encryption. Stories you share with family travel through Apple's CloudKit share — your relatives see them inside their own copy of the app, not on a server we run. Family Museum — the company — cannot read any of it. Neither can Apple. You can stop sharing at any time from inside the app, which removes the recipient's access.

From the family screen, tap the person you want to invite and choose Send invite. The app generates an iCloud share link you can hand off through Messages, Mail, or any way you'd send a photo. They tap the link on their iPhone, Family Museum opens, and the shared archive appears in their app. No accounts to create, no passwords to manage.

No. Nothing leaves your phone for training. The speech recognition and speaker models run on-device using Apple's Neural Engine. A few features (asking the archive a question, transcribing a language your iPhone can't, translating into an uncommon language) can optionally use cloud services if you turn that on — those services don't train on what you send them either.

Your archive lives in iCloud. Sign in on a new iPhone and it's all there — voices, transcripts, photos, the tree. If you ever close your iCloud account, the recordings go with it. We cannot recover them, because we never held a copy.

Yes. Record a story at your grandparents' farmhouse with no signal. Transcription runs locally. Stories sync to iCloud when you're back on wifi — or never, if you keep them on-device only.

Yes. Listener is free forever. Contributors can invite up to eight family members to listen to the shared archive at no cost. Only the person doing the recording needs a subscription.

We built memorial members into the app from the start. Their voices — from any existing recordings — can be added, labeled, and remembered. The tree holds them the same way the family does.

Begin the archive

The archive, alive.

Start with one story. The kitchen, if you can. Someone else will remember the rest.

DOWNLOAD ON THEApp Store
iOS 26 or later · 7-day free trial