v1.2 is live in the App Store!

Just in time for your Labor Day weekend enjoyment, the newest JustFamily app update is live and available in the App Store.

Version 1.2 makes it easier to add and invite your family. No more typing names and email addresses. If you’ve got your family’s email addresses on your phone, all you have to do is tap Invite.

But, because it’s usually better to show than tell, so here’s a few screenshots:

  1. Start by tapping “Invite your family” on the Family Groups screen.

  2. Then tap Contacts on the Invite Family screen.

  3. Scan your Contacts and tap the Invite button to invite a family member

    We automatically group everyone that shares your last name up top in the “Family from Contacts” section.

  4. Select the email address you want to send the invite to.

    If you’ve got 2 email addresses for your sister, you can avoid her work email, for example.

  5. Continue finding your family in Contacts and tapping Invite…then tap Done.

    You can quickly filter the list by typing, for example, your In-law’s last name in the Search field.

  6. That’s it! Your family will get a nice little invite, and away you go.

If you’re feeling ambitious, you can then start adding your family members to the Relationship boxes you’ll find in your Profile. As you add family members to the Relationship boxes, your Default Sharing Groups will be created automatically - both for you and for everyone else you’re connected to. You can also start adding family members to Custom Sharing Groups you create.

Or if you don’t feel like messing around with Relationships or Groups, don’t worry about it! You can just start collecting and sharing memories. Leave everyone in your Unsorted Family group as long as you want. Who knows, maybe some other family member will join and organize all of the family Relationships for you…after all, you did the Inviting.

Don’t most families have the “if you cooked you don’t have to clean” rule?

Home on the Range - L. Glen Quigley

Home on the Range

  • L. Glen Quigley

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Hi there, it’s me Nate.

If you read the “Why we’re building JustFamily” post, you’ve read the story about the recording of my Grandpa Quigley singing “Home on the Range”. The disappearance of that recording was the original inspiration for building JustFamily.

Here’s the longer backstory for those of you that have found your way over here to the JustFamily team blog…

As I mentioned in the note on our About page, I sing “Home on the Range” to my kids at bedtime. They call it “The Cowboy Song”. That lullaby is a Quigley family tradition that started with my Grandpa Quigley. He was a Forest Ranger and he had a beautiful baritone voice. So when he’d sing us that song as young cousins it felt pretty authentic.

At Grandpa’s funeral several years ago someone played a recording of him singing “Home on the Range”. No one knew such a recording existed and it was a powerful moment for all of us who loved him. I immediately thought of my own children. I really wanted them to hear Grandpa sing that song. I felt like it would help connect them to their roots and make our little tradition that much more meaningful. But after calling all of my aunts and uncles and emailing a bunch of my cousins after the funeral I was convinced the recording was gone forever. No one knew who had brought the recording to the funeral and no one knew where it went afterwards. It literally disappeared.

Losing that recording really bothered me. It just felt terrible. Like our whole family had lost something absolutely priceless because we hadn’t worked hard enough to take care of it. My brother Morgan, a CS PhD at Stanford at the time, was just as upset about the loss as I was. So, almost as a way to fight back, we decided to build a web application we could use to make sure a loss like that would never happen again.

With help from a good friend Kiran Shah and a few other talented people we built out the very first prototype of JustFamily, although at the time we called it “Folkstory”. Right away we digitized several reel-to-reel recordings of Grandpa singing that we’d found at his home after the funeral. We uploaded those recordings to JustFamily and breathed a sigh of relief knowing they were now safely and soundly tucked away in the Amazon S3 Cloud.

We invited everyone on our family tree to join JustFamily. Everyone loved having access to those recordings of Grandpa singing and we loved knowing they were now safe. We didn’t have “Home on the Range” but at least we still had Grandpa’s voice. Soon a few of my cousins were uploading scanned copies of old photos I’d never seen before. Seeing all of those incredible memories getting collected together in a safe place where we could all share and enjoy them felt so good to me.

But it got even better. Miraculously, several years later the “Home on the Range” recording that started it all turned up again. As it turned out, my cousin Joanne had the recording all along. She suffered from a terminal disease and she was very close to Grandpa. She was incredibly tough and in spite of her own challenges she lived with my grandparents near the end of their lives and helped them both in so many ways. Joanne may have been the one who brought the recording to the funeral in the first place. In any case, she took it home with her afterwards and kept it safely in her room. When Joanne passed away my Aunt Clara found the tape in her things.

Clara remembered that a bunch of us had been looking for that recording, so she called her brother who lived nearby with the news. Tom collected and digitized the recording and up on JustFamily it went. I’ll never forget how I felt the night I gathered our kids around the computer on the other side of the country and clicked play. I just loved that my kids were able to hear Grandpa sing “The Cowboy Song” while they looked at a picture of him in his Forest Ranger uniform. I loved knowing that all of their cousins and all of my cousins could now remember Grandpa this way too.

Since then our family has collected lots of great memories at JustFamily, but this one will always be one of my favorites.

Why we’re building JustFamily

Hi there!

My name is Nate Quigley and I’m co-founder and CEO of JustFamily. I’m a very happy husband and father to 7 amazing children. I was raised by devoted parents in an idyllic family environment with younger brother and sister. Along with amazing in-laws, I’m part of a large, growing, and supportive extended family.

In short, I’m lucky beyond words. 

Great writers tell you to write what you know, and I think this holds for entrepreneurs too. I started JustFamily because family is what I know and family is what I believe in.

I’m also lucky to have an incredible founding team that feels the same way. So here are a few more specifics on why we’re all building JustFamily.

Because family is different

There are lots of ways to share “what’s happening now” with friends and the world. But family is different. Family is the only social group that cares about the past, the present, and the future. We’re building JustFamily so families can share life together and stay close in a private place, away from work and friends.

Because there are moments we don’t want to forget

A few months ago my three-year-old son Declan found a camping headlamp somewhere in the house. All excited he ran up to me, clicked it on, and said “Daddy! I see in cave. I hold you hand.” I wanted to freeze time. As the father of 7 great kids, I collect amazing moments like that all the time. Those are the stories I don’t want to forget.

Because there are things we don’t want to lose

My Grandpa Quigley was raised in the mountain west. He loved the outdoors, and he became a forest ranger like his father. He also had an amazing baritone voice. As a lullaby, he would sing “Home on the Range” to his kids. Years later he sang it to me and my cousins. Now we sing it to our kids. That song connects our suburbanite families to a meaningful part of our past and helps us remember who we are.

At Grandpa’s funeral, someone played a recording of him singing “Home on the Range” that none of us knew existed. It was incredible to hear his voice again. Unfortunately, the tape disappeared after the funeral somehow. That recording held a story we didn’t want to lose. A few months later, we started hacking together the first prototype of JustFamily.

Because we want to share life together and because we want to remember

We aren’t around the same kitchen table every night, but we still want a private place where we can share our lives together as family. And we want to know that we’re preserving our family stories in a way that will allow us to enjoy and celebrate them for generations to come.

That’s why we’re building JustFamily.

Thanks for reading and thank you for taking a look at what we’ve gotten done so far. So how do you think JustFamily can help you and your family? Please share your ideas with us and we promise to keep building and improving things for you.

Sincerely,

Nate

@njquigley

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email : hello@justfamily.com

Twitter : @justfamily

Facebook : www.facebook.com/JustFamilyApp