Send a question, get a story back.

Asking a parent or grandparent about their life sounds simple, and it is easy to keep putting off. Phone calls drift to the weather and the news. Visits fill up with catching up. And a question as big as ‘tell me about your childhood’ is hard to answer on the spot, so it tends to get a short reply and a change of subject.

A smaller, specific question is easier to say yes to. ‘Picture Sunday dinner when you were growing up. What was it like?’ can be answered in a few minutes, at the kitchen table, whenever the person has a quiet moment.

Questions in Ancestorii are built on that idea: one question at a time, answered in the person’s own words, and kept somewhere the whole family can find it.

Yes. Questions are answered in the Ancestorii app, which is free on iPhone and Android, and there is no way to answer on the website. If the person has never used the app, the link takes their phone straight to the right store. On a computer, it shows the code for that question, so they can find it once the app is installed.

That is a real difference from the services built around email and text messages. As of October 2026, Storyworth sends weekly questions by text or email, and storytellers reply by email, by recording their voice over the phone, or on its website. Remento sends a storytelling prompt by email or text message, once a week by default, and storytellers record by clicking the link, with no app to download and no password to remember.

If the person you want to hear from will never install an app, one of those may suit them better; our Storyworth alternative and Remento alternative pages set out the differences. If they do have a smartphone, the app’s advantage is where the answer lands: in your family’s private space, next to your photos and voice notes, where the rest of the family can read it too.

The answer is saved as a memory in your family’s private My Family feed. At the top it shows ‘In response to’ and the question you asked, so anyone reading it years from now knows what prompted it. Only the people you have invited into your family space can see it. It does not appear on Our Stories or in search results.

You get an email headed with their name and ‘answered your question’. It quotes the question you asked and has a button to read their memory. From there it behaves like any other memory in the feed. Family can leave a heart or a comment, and anyone who remembers the moment differently can choose ‘Add your memory of this moment’ to add their own version, with up to 10 photos.

Each version sits on the same page as its own tab, so one question about Sunday dinner can end up holding three people’s memories of the same table. Read more about how the private My Family feed works.

If they already use the app and haven’t answered after 24 hours, Ancestorii sends them one reminder notification. It only ever sends one, so nobody gets nagged. Question links are time-limited, so if a link runs out before they get to it, send the question again.

A few things make an answer more likely:

Partly because the answers do not keep on their own. The name of the village, the reason the family moved, the song that was always on in the kitchen: details like these live in one person’s memory until somebody asks.

There is research behind the habit too. In a 2008 brief report in the journal Psychotherapy, Marshall Duke of Emory University’s Department of Psychology and his co-authors Amber Lazarus and Robyn Fivush found that children’s and adolescents’ knowledge of their family history was linked with an internal locus of control, higher self-esteem, better family functioning, lower anxiety and fewer behaviour problems. The study shows a link, not cause and effect, but it is a good reason to collect the stories while the people who hold them can still tell them.

If you would rather ask face to face, our guide to questions to ask your grandparents has plenty more to start with.

Questions are one part of the private side of Ancestorii, called My Family. The same app holds your family’s memories, albums, timelines and voice notes, so an answer to ‘Every family came from somewhere before here. Do you know where ours started?’ can sit beside the photos of the place itself. You can start on the Free plan, which includes 1 GB of family storage, or move to Premium, which is £3.99 a month for the whole family and includes 100 GB.

What it does not do: it does not send questions on a schedule for you, it does not work by email or text alone, and it does not turn answers into a book by itself. If you want the stories on paper, you design a printed Memory Book yourself, from £44.99 plus delivery.