The Magical Memory Jar

Hi, there. Nate again.

Lots of our early private beta users asked us where the whole idea for the jar icon in our logo came from. Well, dear reader, this is the story…

From our earliest days we would talk as a team about our purpose and the resulting “identity” that should follow along with it. The purpose part was actually pretty easy. We all wanted to build a fun and easy way to collect, share, and save family memories. But we argued a lot about the best way to communicate this purpose to the world.

First of all, what should we call the company? The name debate continued on and off for a long time and for a good while we called ourselves Folkstory. But after lots of arguing and brainstorming we settled on JustFamily and we love it for lots of reasons. I’ll write about that process some other time.

We also really wanted to think of a symbol or icon that could somehow represent what we were trying to do. We wanted something interesting and fun and evocative. We dismissed a bunch of possible choices (e.g., journal, scrapbook, picture frame, family tree, etc.) as too either too obvious or not fun enough.

The icon we settled in on—The Magical Memory Jar—didn’t exactly come to us in a flash of inspiration. Instead it evolved through several stages:

Stage 1: Fireflies (aka Spooky Backyard)

Early on we got ourselves all excited about how memories were like fireflies. Then we got excited about how magical it is for kids to run around in a late spring backyard catching fireflies and watching them glow in Mason jars. Enamored with all of these glowy happy thoughts about my childhood in Connecticut we sort of went crazy with it and cooked up an early homepage that looked like the screenshot above.

Soon afterwards it became apparent that the backyard was more scary than nostalgic. Was the fence on fire? Was the boogeyman in the woods? And these firefly memories that we were catching…were they really going to stay in that jar forever? Wouldn’t they die and then just be kind of gross? I mean, they’re bugs right?

Stage 2: Seashells (aka Shiny Happy Beach)

Amazingly, our offices are right across the street from the beach. One really beautiful morning I was out for a little run. I was kind of zoning out and thinking about this identity problem when a shell caught my eye. I stopped and picked it up and snapped a picture of it with my iPhone - in fact, the picture just above. A little lightbulb went off and I put the shell in my pocket and started running back to the office.

The next morning I took a Mason jar and a bunch of shells we’d all collected out to the dune crossover across the street. I brought along my fancy camera and took a bunch of pictures in macro mode. My co-founder John then did a quick-and-dirty photoshop job to replace the “Ball” logo with “folkstory”. Before noon we had a new homepage.

Goodbye, Spooky Backyard. Hello, Shiny, Happy Beach!

Stage 3: Keepsake Jar (aka Magical Memory Jar)

A few months later we enlisted the help of the amazingly talented people at SoftFacade to help us make the keepsake jar vision come to life. We loved the idea of life as a little jog down the beach. There are lots of little ho-hum rocks and shells. But every so often something catches your eye that you want to stop and admire. You want to pick it up and collect it even.

The nice little juvenile whelk became for us the perfect proxy for that amazing moment when your four-year-old clicks on his camping headlight and gives you a hug. You want to collect that little moment. Put it in your pocket. Drop it in your keepsake jar when you get home. Share it with your wife and your mom and dad. Keep it safe. And then from time to time, you can dump those shells back out of the jar and onto the rug where you’re sitting with your kids. Sort through the shells as you all pick them up again. Find the little juvenile whelk again and smile.

So, that’s it… that’s the story of where the Magical Memory Jar icon came from. I’ll write about why the Memory Jar is magical when we’re ready to launch our Collections feature. That’s not too far off.

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