Home and family
Family histories, legacy binders, care binders, a house’s own manual and the guide to a trip you are taking together.
Families keep knowledge in heads, drawers and group chats until the day someone needs it. These recipes gather it into a library that one person keeps and others can read.
Several of them hold sensitive information. The recipes say plainly which ones stay private, never belong on a public link, and never hold passwords, account numbers or door codes: write where those are kept, not what they are.
Recipesfive recipes
- 28 A family history bookFor a family historian writing up four generations, from the ship manifest to the people still livingWrite up four generations as a document per family line: each record an Evidence finding with its sources, each brick wall a Question, an index of names and places, and a link that leaves the living out.
- 29 A legacy binderFor a parent in their fifties who wants the family to find everything without guessingWrite down where everything is, by institution and drawer, never by number or password; let your assistant build it and ask what your executor would still not know; and decide honestly how the right person will reach it.
- 30 A caregiver’s binderFor an adult child coordinating care for a father with Parkinson’s diseaseKeep a parent’s medications, clinicians, questions and a daily log in one private place; your assistant organises the questions and summarises the log, and never interprets anything.
- 31 A house manualFor the owner of a 1964 ranch house who is tired of finding the water shut-off with a torch at two in the morningWrite the manual your house never came with: a document per system, a finding per appliance with its model, warranty and service history, a researched maintenance calendar, and a link for the house-sitter.
- 32 A group trip guideFor someone organising a ten-person, three-generation family trip to PortugalPlan a ten-person trip in one document: the overview as the itinerary, a finding per day and per booking, local picks researched with sources, and a password link for the family that expires after the trip.