Gentle writing help for when the words won’t come.

Writing about someone you love is rarely hard because you do not know them. It is hard because an empty box for their early years, or for the message inside a time capsule, asks for everything at once, so it gets left for another day.

Story Assistance is there for that moment. It does not know your family, and it is not there to write your family’s story. It works from the details already on the page, such as a name, a relationship, a date or an album title, and gives you something smaller to respond to: a question about the house they grew up in, or a rough caption you can make your own.

It offers two kinds of help, depending on where you are.

Guiding questions. Most options reply with three to five questions, each with a short paragraph underneath to jog your memory. On a Loved Ones page, ‘Early Years’ asks about where the person grew up, school, childhood friends, favourite foods and the sounds and smells of their childhood home, using their name. In the Our Stories editor, ‘Help me start’ asks where you were and who else was there, ‘Help me go deeper’ asks what you only understood years later, and ‘Help me end it’ asks where the people in the story are now. These options are set up to ask questions, not to write the story for you.

Short drafts. A few options write a first draft for you to rework: four photo captions in different tones (nostalgic, playful, tender and simple), an album description of four or five sentences, a two-paragraph capsule message about life now and your hopes for whoever opens it, or a two-paragraph introduction for a Memory Book.

Either way, the suggestion appears in a separate card on the page, with a note to use it as a starting point and write it in your own words. ‘Try another’ asks for a fresh suggestion, and ‘Different section’ takes you back to the list of options.

No. Story Assistance never edits your text. Its suggestions stay in their own card, and nothing goes into your page unless you type or paste it in yourself. You can close the card on any page, ask for another suggestion, or ignore it completely.

That matters most for the pieces your family will keep: a capsule message someone opens years from now, or the introduction to a printed Memory Book. Treat a draft the way you would treat a friend’s suggestion. Keep the line that sounds like you, cut the rest, and add the details only you know. A draft can only work from what is on the page, so read it for anything that is not true to the person before you keep a word of it.

Ancestorii’s privacy policy says it does not use your content to train AI models, and that what you send through Story Assistance is not used to train them either.

When you ask for a suggestion, the details from that page are sent to Claude, the AI model made by Anthropic: for example a name, a relationship and dates on a Loved Ones page, an album or capsule title, or, in the memory and story editors, the title and what you have written so far. Anthropic’s Privacy Center says that by default it does not use inputs or outputs from its commercial products, which include its API, to train its models, unless a customer explicitly reports feedback or chooses to allow it. It also says that for API users it deletes inputs and outputs from its systems within 30 days, with exceptions such as a separate data agreement, enforcing its usage policy or complying with the law.

On Ancestorii’s side, each request is logged with the type of help, the model, token counts and how long it took, not the words themselves. And if you switch Story Assistance off, nothing is sent to the model at all.

Story Assistance is on for every new account, and each person in a family decides for themselves. To turn it off:

1. Sign in on the Ancestorii website and choose My Profile from the profile menu at the top of the page.
2. Find the Preferences card, where Story Assistance has its own switch.
3. Turn the switch off and save your profile.

While it is off, the help card may still show its options, but no suggestions are generated: asking for one shows a message that Story Assistance is turned off. Switch it back on the same way whenever you like.

Often. If the words are already there, use them. A few things are always better in your own words:

Story Assistance is built into the places families tend to get stuck: the four chapters of a Loved Ones page, the message inside a time capsule, the page notes of a printed Memory Book, which starts at £44.99 plus delivery, and stories for Our Stories. It costs nothing extra on either plan.

What it will not do: it knows nothing about your family beyond the details on the page, so it cannot research your family history, check facts or remember people for you. It will not write a whole life story in one go, either. It is a prompt for your memory, not a replacement for it.