Building a Memory Machine for My Mom (and then my whole family)

The Problem

There are things I want to know about my mom that I’ve never asked — not because I don’t care, but because the moment never quite arrives, or I assume there will be more time, or life moves fast enough that I forget until something reminds me again. I suspect most people have a version of this problem. The questions pile up quietly, and the people who could answer them get older, and at some point you realize the window is shorter than you thought.

So I built a small tool to fix it.

What It Does

Reich Memories sends questions to family members on a randomized schedule — a few per week, via email (hopefully Signal eventually as well) — and saves their replies to a private searchable archive.