My mum, Valerie, has spent years making books like this for our family.

She writes them herself. She tracks down the photographs, works out where each one belongs, and pays to have the finished book printed properly. She made one for my grandpa and grandma. One for my school years. Others for my brother and my sister. Every one took her months, worked on in the evenings and at weekends around everything else.

I learned things from those books that I would never have picked up any other way. I found out that my grandpa worked full time and studied in the evenings to get himself qualified. That is not the sort of thing you see in a photo album, but it was there in writing, and now I know it.

My favourite is the one about the warships. My grandpa was a chemistry professor, and during the war he became interested in how to hide a ship at sea. A white ship vanished against the horizon at night, but the moment it passed a dark coastline it stood out and became a target. He and his colleagues found that wiping the hull with sodium sulphide mixed with seawater turned it black almost at once, right when it needed to be. He published the work with my grandma. I would never have known any of it if my mum had not sat down and written it out.

That is the part that matters to me. Not the printing, not the photo albums. The part where someone you love becomes a bit more real to you, because somebody took the time to ask the questions and write the answers down.

I built Chapternity so that work does not have to take months, and so it does not have to fall to my mum every time. Sage asks the kind of questions a good interviewer would ask, listens to what you say, and turns it into a book worth keeping. You go at your own pace, with no deadline and no pressure. What you end up with is the thing Valerie spent months making, for everyone she loves.

Mark

Founder of Chapternity, and Valerie's son