Captrove · Family archives
A name on the back of a photograph. The occasion behind a letter. The person who remembers an object. Those details belong in the record too.
A connected family record
We digitize the material and record the names, dates, places and stories your family can explain. We distinguish what is documented from what is remembered or uncertain.
This is not genealogy research or an appraisal. If your collection is mainly photographs and slides, start with photo digitizing at home.
How we handle uncertainty
When your aunt says a photograph is from around 1953, we write down that she said it, and that she was not certain. We do not quietly convert a recollection into a fact.
This matters more than it sounds. Families build genealogies, settle disputes and make decisions on these records for decades afterwards. A date that was always a guess should still look like a guess in twenty years.
Where something can be corroborated — a date stamped on the print, a name written on the back, a document that confirms it — we note that too, and say which it was.
“About 1953, Aunt Ruth thinks” is a more useful record than “1953”.
Privacy
A box of family documents can hold medical records, wills, financial statements and identity documents. We treat all of it as yours: digitized at your house, delivered to you, and our working copy deleted afterwards.
We do not sell it, share it, or train anything on your family’s material.
What it costs
This work is charged for the time it takes, because there is no honest way to price a box nobody has opened yet. Some families have three albums and a folder of certificates. Some have forty years in a closet.
We will look at what you have, tell you what a session is likely to cost and roughly how many it will take, and you decide from there. If the honest answer is that you do not need us — that the collection is small enough to do yourself — that is the answer you will get.
Next step
Roughly how much there is, whose it is, and whether there is someone we should sit with sooner rather than later. We will tell you what it would take.