Support

It interviews someone about their life, out loud, one question at a time, and writes the answers into chapters of a family history. Usually an adult son or daughter sets it up for a parent or grandparent, but you can also tell your own story.

The stories are kept in a family account. Brothers and sisters can be invited to read and help, and the person telling the story can answer on your phone or on her own iPhone or iPad.

• An iPhone with iOS 17 or later: an iPhone XS, XR or newer, or an iPhone SE from 2020 or later.
• An iPad with iPadOS 17 or later: most iPads from 2018 or later.
• There is no Android version. If Mom has an Android phone or an older iPhone, you can run her sessions with her on your own iPhone or iPad.

To check, open Settings, then General, then About, and look at the iOS version.

The app asks its questions and listens in English (US). An internet connection is needed to join a family and for the story to be written; sessions themselves work without one, and the recordings upload later. Each hour of talking uploads about 30 MB, so Wi-Fi is best.

1. Open the app and tap Get started.
2. Tell the app whose story you’re telling, and add a first name, the year they were born and where they grew up. That helps it ask about the right years and places.
3. Choose a comfortable text size, and let the app use the microphone.
4. Sign in with Apple, with Google, or with an email address and password.
5. Name your family, and choose how the story should be written: “Ruth grew up in…” or “I grew up in…”. Tap Create our family.

Before the first session, the person telling the story is asked, by name and out loud, whether the app may record her answers and use outside speech and AI services to write her story. Please ask with her beside you, and respect her answer.

Already have an account? Tap I already have an account on the first screen instead. Were you sent an invitation? Tap My family invited me.

The microphone and speech recognition let it hear the answers and write them down as they are spoken. The camera is only for photographing or scanning old photos, if you choose to. If you said no earlier and want to change it:

1. Open the device’s Settings app.
2. Tap Privacy & Security, then Microphone (or Speech Recognition, or Camera), and turn on Family Stories (the app’s name under its icon).

Would you rather not? Answers can be typed instead. The privacy policy explains how answers and recordings are handled.

• The person who created the family (the owner) and the relatives the owner lets in (managers) can read every story in the family and listen to its recordings.
• A storyteller’s own iPhone or iPad shows only her own story, and the names of the people who can read it.
• Nobody else, unless someone in the family makes a share link.

1. In the app, open Family, tap her name, then Set up a phone or iPad for her. You’ll see a 12-digit number, a QR code and a Send in a text button.
2. Send her the text, or read her the number over the phone, or let her phone’s camera scan the QR code.
3. On her device, she installs Easy Family Histories, then taps the link, or opens the app, taps My family invited me and types the number.

There’s no password, email or sign-in for her. Her device needs Wi-Fi or a data connection the first time; after that, sessions work anywhere. Before her first session, her own device asks for her okay to record.

An invitation works once and for 7 days. Making a new one for her stops the old one. If a manager (not the owner) makes the invitation, the owner is asked to say yes before her device can open her story.

• Check the 12 digits. After several wrong tries the app pauses for 10 minutes.
• An invitation works only once, and only for 7 days. Make a new one: Family, her name, Set up a phone or iPad.
• Her device needs iOS 17 or iPadOS 17 or later, and a connection.
• A device can belong to one family only. If it was set up for another family, remove it there first.

Yes. Send a second invitation for the second person and use it on the same iPad. The iPad then asks “Who’s telling today?” at the start, with a big button for each name. Each person has their own chapters, and each is asked for their own okay.

The family’s owner can invite a manager from the Family tab. Your brother or sister opens the invitation, signs in with their own account, and the owner approves them. Managers can read every story in the family, listen to the recordings, fix details, add photos and share.

In Family, tap her name and remove the old device; it loses access at once. Then set up the new one with a new invitation. Recordings that had not uploaded from a lost phone can’t be recovered; everything that reached the family’s account is safe.

You choose each time: 10, 20, 30 or 45 minutes, or no time limit. The questions are paced to fit the time you have.

When about two minutes are left, the app gives a gentle heads-up. It never cuts anyone off mid-sentence.

Say “pause” at any time, or tap the big Pause button. The clock stops and the place is saved.

When you’re ready, say “I’m back” or tap Resume. The place is kept for days.

Yes. When you start a session, under Who’s asking the questions? choose I will. The app stays quiet, shows you each question in large type to ask her in your own words, suggests follow-ups after each answer, and keeps her answers.

• She can say “skip”, or “I’d rather not talk about that”. The interviewer moves on and won’t bring that topic up again.
• Right after an answer, she can say “forget that”, and the answer is erased.
• Later, anyone in the family can mark an answer Leave this out of the book, so it’s never written into the story or shared, or Forget this answer to erase it.

Yes. In the app’s Settings you can choose a text size for each device, and the interviewer’s voice and speaking pace for each storyteller.

The app also follows the device’s own text size and works with VoiceOver and Reduce Motion. To make text larger everywhere, open Settings, then Accessibility, Display & Text Size and Larger Text.

Yes. The recordings keep uploading after the phone is locked or the app is put away. If the app is swiped away completely, they wait on the phone and go the next time the app is opened. Nothing is lost either way, as long as the app stays installed.

Yes. Set a reminder in Settings, for example Tuesdays at 10 am. A reminder set on your phone also reaches her own phone or iPad. Reminders are notifications scheduled on the device, so allow notifications when the app asks.

To stop them, change the reminder in the app, or turn off notifications for Family Stories (the app’s name under its icon) in the device’s Settings app.

Usually a few minutes after each session, once the phone or iPad is connected. Until then, the story shows “Being written…” and her answers as she said them. The story is written from her own words; the app doesn’t add details she didn’t give.

Tap Fix a detail on the story to correct it. Your fix is always kept, even when more of the story is written later.

If she has told two different versions of something, such as “a few weeks” once and “a month” later, the app doesn’t guess. It asks, “Which is right?” It can be answered out loud or in the story, or left for later.

Yes. Open Family, tap her name, and choose How the story is written: “Ruth grew up in Ogden…” or “I grew up in Ogden…”. Switching rewrites the chapters, usually within the hour; paragraphs fixed by hand stay as they are unless you ask for them to be rewritten too.

Add photos from your library, take one with the camera, or tap Scan a photo to scan an old print. Give it a caption if you like, and leave “Ask me about it” on: “Tell me about this picture” becomes one of her next questions, with the photo shown large while she talks. The photo then appears in her chapter, in the book and on shared pages.

The app removes the location and all other hidden details from a photo before it leaves the device. Photos are never sent to AI. Deleting a photo removes it everywhere.

In the app, the family can always listen to her recordings. On a shared page, passages in her own voice play only if she says yes herself, on her own device (Settings, Let family hear my voice) or out loud on a screen handed to her, and only on links that include her voice. She can turn it off at any time, and anyone in the family can turn it off; only she can turn it on.

Yes. In Settings, Bring in a history you’ve started: a PDF, a Word document, a text file, or pasted text. Its words are kept as written, and the interviewer asks about what’s missing. Imported documents are read by an outside AI service to do this; the privacy policy has the details.

We don’t sell printed books. You can save a copy of the story, which includes the book as a PDF, and print it at home or at a print shop.

Share links come with a full history (see pricing). In Settings, Who can read the story, create a private link and send it however you like. Anyone with the link can:

• read the story, with its photos;
• listen to it read aloud in a natural-sounding voice, and hear passages in her own voice if she said yes;
• download it as a PDF book or an MP3 audiobook.

They don’t need the app or a sign-in. Shared pages are hidden from search engines, but anyone who has the link can open it, so share it only with people she would want to read it.

In Settings, Who can read the story, turn the link off. Access through it stops immediately. If she asks for her story to be deleted, every link to it pauses at once.

Copies someone has already downloaded, such as a PDF book or an audiobook, can’t be recalled.

In Settings, tap Save a copy of her story (on her own device: Save a copy of my story). You get one file with the book as a PDF, each chapter as text, every recording in her own voice, the photos and imported documents. It’s free, always, whether or not you’ve bought anything, and it’s a good idea before deleting anything.

Free to try. A family gets 45 minutes of interviews with all the AI help, shared by everyone in the family, plus one imported document and ten photos. The free minutes come with the first family a person creates. Reading, fixing, listening in the app and saving a copy are free, always.

A full history: $99 per storyteller (in the US; the App Store shows the price where you live). It’s a one-time purchase through Apple, with nothing to renew. It includes:

• 20 hours of interviews with all the AI help (a whole life usually takes 10 to 20 hours);
• up to 500 photos and 10 imported documents;
• up to 20 share links, with the PDF book, the audiobook, reading aloud, and her own voice if she says yes.

A family telling two people’s stories buys a full history for each.

Only the time she spends answering, measured from the recordings. The interviewer’s questions and the pauses don’t count. Managers can see how much is used, for example “12 of 20 hours used”, by tapping her name in the Family tab, and get a heads-up near the end.

Sessions never stop and nothing is lost. New answers are kept word for word, exactly as she said them, and the family is told. After a full history is bought, the answers kept meanwhile are written into her story. If she needs more than 20 hours, please email us.

The person telling her story never sees a price or a limit.

The owner or a manager, in Family: tap her name, then Unlock her full history. Purchases are kept in the family account, so everyone in the family sees them on any device. If a purchase needs a parent’s approval (Ask to Buy), it arrives later, ready to give to a storyteller.

Make sure you’re signed in to the same family. Then open Family, Purchases and interview time, and tap Restore purchases. That re-sends anything bought on that device that didn’t reach your family account, for example if the phone went offline right after paying. It never charges you again. If it still doesn’t show, email us; please don’t include card details.

Purchases are made through Apple, so Apple handles refunds. Ask for one at reportaproblem.apple.com, or in the App Store app: tap your picture, then Purchase History.

After a refund, nothing is deleted: her story, the recordings, saved copies and links you already shared stay readable. New interviews go back to the family’s free time.

If a storyteller’s story is erased when she had recorded less than 2 hours, her full history goes back to the family once, to give to someone else. Otherwise it counts as used. Deleting the whole family deletes its purchases too. A purchase can’t be moved to someone else once it has been given to a storyteller.

On her own iPhone or iPad (or, for your own story, on yours), open Settings and tap Stop and delete my story, then confirm twice. Right away, nothing new is recorded or shared and the family is told, but she can still read it. Seven days later, her whole story is deleted: recordings, transcripts, chapters, photos and links.

Changed her mind? She taps Keep my story before then. Only she can cancel; the family can’t. If the family would like a copy, they can save one during those 7 days.

• One answer: in the story, Forget this answer. The recording, its transcript and what the story took from it are erased.
• A storyteller’s whole story: the family’s owner, in Settings, Erase her story.
• The whole family: the owner, in Settings, Account, Delete this family. Every story in it is erased, for everyone.

Erasing can’t be undone, so save a copy first if you’d like one. Copies relatives already downloaded can’t be recalled.

1. Open Settings.
2. Under Account, tap Delete my account.
3. If you own a family, choose whether to hand it to a manager or to delete it, with its stories.
4. Read what will happen, then confirm. If you haven’t signed in recently, the app asks you to sign in again first.

Signed in but not part of any family (for example, after deleting your family)? Delete my account is on the first screen the app shows you instead.

Your own story, if you were telling one, is erased. In families you help with, you leave, and the changes you made stay in the story without your name. Then your sign-in account is deleted, and the app clears what it kept on your device.

A few things are kept for a short while afterward, such as a minimal record that the deletion happened (about 30 days) and our 7-day recovery history. The privacy policy lists them all.

If you signed in with Apple, deleting in the app also removes the app’s Sign in with Apple access. If we delete your account for you, you can remove Easy Family Histories yourself from the apps that use Sign in with Apple, in your Apple Account settings.

Yes. If you can’t use the app, email support@easyfamilyhistories.com. Please tell us how you sign in (Apple, Google or email) and the email address you use with the app.

Because deletion can’t be undone, we first make sure the request comes from the account holder. An email address on its own isn’t proof, so we don’t act on your first message. We find your account and send a new message to the email address on it, and we delete the account only after you reply to that message to confirm. If you use Hide My Email with Sign in with Apple, we write to the private address Apple gave us, which Apple forwards to you.

Deleting it for you erases the same information from our servers as deleting in the app. Once it’s done, we tell you by email, and then we delete our emails with you, including your request and any earlier emails you sent us.

• Stories are kept in a private family account. Only the people the owner lets in, and her own device, can read them, unless someone makes a share link.
• Before anything is recorded, the storyteller is asked by name and out loud. With her okay, outside services turn her recordings into text and read aloud, and an outside AI service writes the story and suggests questions. Photos are never sent to AI.
• Everything is stored with our cloud provider in the United States, encrypted in transit and at rest.
• No ads, no selling or renting of personal information, no cross-app tracking and no analytics. This website uses no cookies.

Read the full privacy policy

Telling a life story can bring back hard memories, and sometimes it brings up something happening now. If someone needs help:

• In an emergency, or if someone may be in danger right now, call 911 (or your local emergency number).
• If you or someone you’re with is thinking about suicide, or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, any time, in the US.
• If you’re worried an older person is being hurt, neglected or taken advantage of, contact Adult Protective Services in your state. The Eldercare Locator can connect you: call 1-800-677-1116.

The app never pushes. She can say “skip”, “pause” or “I’d rather not talk about that” at any time, and an answer can be left out of the book or forgotten (see during a session).

We aren’t a crisis service and can’t respond to emergencies, but you’re always welcome to write to us about anything that went wrong.

Email support@easyfamilyhistories.com. These details help us help you:

• What you were trying to do, and what happened instead.
• Whether it happened on your device or on the storyteller’s own iPhone or iPad.
• The device’s model and iOS version. You’ll find both in Settings, then General, then About.
• The app version, if you know it.
• For account or purchase questions, how you sign in (Apple, Google or email) and the email address you use.
• A screenshot, if it helps. On most iPhones, press the side button and the volume up button at the same time.

Please never send us a password, an invitation number or card details.