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

She wrote the stories herself, found and placed every photograph by hand, and had them printed properly, at real cost, in time and money, for the people she loved most. She made one for my grandparents, Leslie and Mary. Another for my own school years. Others for my brother and my sister too. Each one took months. There was no template, no shortcut. Just the same quiet, careful work, over and over, for every person she wanted to honour.

I learned things from her books that I would never have known otherwise. That Leslie worked full time while studying in the evenings to further himself, the kind of quiet determination you don't see in family photographs, but you can read about.

The story I think about most is this one. Leslie was a chemistry professor who became fascinated by camouflage for warships and submarines. During the war, a white ship blended best with the horizon at night, but close to a dark coastline, white made it a target instead. He and his colleagues worked out that swabbing the ships with sodium sulphide in seawater turned them black, almost instantly, right when it mattered most. He published the work with Mary. They were doing real, useful science together, decades before I was born, and I would never have known any of it without my mum's book.

That is the part I wanted to protect. Not the photo albums, not the printing. The part where someone you love becomes a little more known to you, because someone else took the time to ask, to gather, and to write it down properly.

Chapternity exists because that work shouldn't take months, and it shouldn't fall to Valerie alone, every single time, for every person she wants to honour. The conversation, the writing, the formatting, that's what we've tried to make easier. The care, the specificity, the actual story, that part was never the problem. That part was always the point.