Personal Encyclopedias

My grandfather left five moving cartons of diaries written by typewriter, every single day of his adult life documented, an achievement, to be sure. When he passed away he left them to my mother to be scanned, transcribed and moved online, something that weighed her down for the last 15 years of her life.

When he died there was no way of transcribing them automatically (there still isn't really). The boxes stood in my mothers already cramped attic for 13 years, then she got cancer, and she felt a need to finish up things, so she got a scanner and started just scanning.

When my mother died she had scanned about a thousand pages, not transcribed, not anything.

The text in the diaries were fun at times, sometimes depressing, seeing how little he cared about my mother and his family was crushing.

My brother wanted to continue the scanning but I told him that I wanted to throw the diaries away. He kept half a year of writing around his birth (there's at least a sentence) and my uncle did the same, then we just watched it all burn (not literally, we threw it away at the recycling centre).

Not everything needs to be preserved. I'm happy some parts is preserved. I'm happy that those diaries are ash.

That sounds like a really cool project and a really interesting way to preserve family history.

I feel like i don't know how to emotionally react to the AI part of this story. To begin with, it is fundamentally cool we have technology like that. At the same time it felt bittersweet, like an artisan being put out of business by the factory. The first part of the story felt like much of the love was in constructing everything by hand, it seems almost sad to lose that. There is also an element of dystopia in how the AI was able to cross reference everything, bank statements, ticketmaster recipts, shazam, etc. It is kind of unsettling the power of it all.

Not sure where i'm going with this comment. Its a super cool project, thanks for sharing.

I do something similar with my wife; at the start of every year we take around 50 sheets of paper and bind them into a little notebook. The binding cloth we use is usually a combination of clothes that tore, fell into abject disrepair the previous year. She then finds little things (ex: matchbox from a restaurant we visited and loved) and decorates it.

Throughout the year we keep writing in it, things we learnt, discords we had and how we resolved them, recipes I experimented with and we loved, random thoughts; basically anything and everything. And that little diary becomes an embodiment of that year.

I would also like to point out the manual labor and writing into it and not using an obsidian++-AI-auto-categorizer-3000 is simply because it feels like it's worth something, it's a nice little routine we have at the start of every year, and it's really fun reading these from 2-3 years back. Also the kids will have some really interesting reading a few years down the line.

I imagine a future where this becomes a family tradition that transcends time, knowledge from different generations, living different lives all nicely recorded in these codices. Something about this whole thing feels really beautiful to me.

I am starting to do this with actual physical books. I have thousands of photos going back over my life, and I am putting them together in Scribus to then go and print a physical book for each year or event or holiday along with some relevant text.

Ideally square books that can go on a coffee table. At least when I am dead there will be some part of my existence in physical form, unlike all the digital things we spend decades creating.

I might put a SD card taped in the front of each one with a video too, so someone can watch it in the future.

As a separate aside, I also found old Canon photo printers (Selphy models) on ebay for about £5! Some need the little white gear inside glueing back on (there's a video on YouTube about it), and they DO NOT work with Windows anymore, but gutenprint supports them fine on Linux, so I have been printing photos (postcard size) at home. The colour isn't going to win awards and the saturation needs boosting slightly in the printer options compared to default, but it's a wonderful way to finally get some photos from trips on the walls.

Extremely cool. I'm into genealogy and can trace my family 10 generations back (250 years) to their arrival to Argentina. Documentation is lost or lacking once you reach Europe, other branches of the family with more recent arrivals to the country are very hard to trace. In part due to mismatching surnames and in part due to the wars.

We have started asking old family members to send us whatsapp audios with tales and things they remember from long-passed away family members; and what was life like in the 1930-40-50s. I want to start organizing all the info and data we have, my father has built a couple family trees, but this wiki format is indeed very promising. I'll keep an eye on this and see if we can use it.

I did the same thing and came away with a different opinion.

The MediaWiki server died and I had backups, but... literally no one in the family would've tried to resurrect it.

They knew I'd worked on genealogy for a while but I don't think anyone would've thought to rebuild a linux box covered in dust and somehow find an old MediaWiki install on it.

I should've made simple markdown files with images in an image directory and printed out copies. That's a legacy. A consolidated, easy to drag from grandpa's house and throw on a shelf and flip through, even in 2097.

The project itself is cool if you have access to a LLM API endpoint with good privacy (perhaps your own GPU server).

I wouldn't give a LLM run by a US corporation access to my private photographs.

> On top of that, I exported my location timeline from Google Maps, my Uber trips, my bank transactions, and Shazam history. I would ask Claude Code to start with the photos and then gradually give it access to the different data exports.

Is anyone else feeling uncomfortable with that? It is a great project and I don't want to bash it with general concerns, but sharing all my financial and location details with any service seems like opening the floodgates to my house.

My concern is not even strictly related to AI, but about sharing all my most private data with any service. There is always a significant chance all of it is leaked sooner or later.

First off, this is a super cool project. Kudos to getting it started and up and running. Family history, and memorabilia and organizing all that stuff is super challenging, and just having a proper site to look at is worth its own effort.

Unlike some of the comments herein, I find this as a perfect use of technology in service of users. (Yes, with some limits). I liken this to Maggie Appleton's Home-cooked Software model [1], wherein barefoot developers use technology (AI-driven or not) for writing apps for their own purposes, nominally for a user base of 1 (or very few), with possibilities of expanding to a few dozen.

In that vein, I'm a barefoot developer, and much of the software I have written in the past few months (with help from Claude, ChatGPT) is very much for that tiny user base of a few dozen (=mostly me, if I'm honest). And that is perfectly fine by moi.

I wrote a utility to organize roughly 100K+ photographs (and videos) neatly into dates/location, both for backup, as well as to maintain the memories in an organized fashion. Asked Claude to lookup location by EXIF; haven't yet asked it to "guess the location by photo" when no GPS info existed in the EXIFs. But I think I might do that.

(no, I haven't asked Claude to go thru my Uber trips or bank statements! I draw a line there!)

That is why the OP's personal wiki made me so excited - because the whole output resonates with me.

Like a few commenters mentioned their journaling experiences. I've started doing that with some of our trips (mostly post pandemic), both to remember our experiences better, and to come back to them as needed. The simple act of writing down places visited, experiences had (mostly hikes, mountains climbed, meals consumed in distant foreign places, weird/quirky experiences) causes them to be fresh in one's memories.

Thanks, this was a great project, and a great reminder as well.

[1] https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software

I like the idea, but I'm curious where to draw the boundary. If only I can read it, it can be my full recollection of everything. If I add my siblings, parents, cousins, etc, then some articles become painful or controversial (e.g. divorce, disease). Or I just ommit all the unhappy parts.

This is perfect example how to solve problem which should have been solved in our digital lives already decades ago. The issue is that our personal lives have been outsourced to social media platforms (looking at you Facebook...)

Obviously not everyone has same needs or wants to retain stories and memories but lack of social structures and solutions seems like weird mishap.

This is pretty wholesome. This takes Personal Knowledge Management to a whole other level.

I just completed an 18 month travel sabbatical with my wife - would this be useful to catalog and cluster all of our photos based on geolocation and prompt us to collect memories?

What a lovely read, at least up until the AIfied bit.

Though from the title I didn't expect family history, I thought it was going to be more of a project like this: https://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Everything_Shii_Know...

Fascinating idea! So wish I had parents and grands around so I could record all the old family stories that were told over the years. If you readers take no other action after reading this post, start recording your own oral history/stories; yours, parents, kids, friends, etc.

> Her face lit up as she narrated the backstory behind the occasion, going from photo to photo, resurfacing details that had been dormant for decades.

I had started something similar with my mom over Christmas in '24. About half way through the collection she asked to stop. We would do the rest on her next visit.

Well. It never came to that as she passed away completely unexpected in March last year.

I’ll never get the chance to record the other stories. The stories from the second half of the photo collection.

I cheer for projects like this.

I like the overall project and goal. I personally would like a way to ask questions to those that are living or have a template that I can use for filling in family history.

Secondly, the home page seems like I am reading a family history page more than talking about the software. It is confusing to me.

Thanks for sharing.

This is a really fun project and the family interview transcripts + LLM workflow feels like a genuinely good use of the technology.

I would probably have ended well before "I exported my Google Maps location history, Uber trips, bank transactions, and Shazam history."

Aside: I've started seeing lot of AI projects in this category say some variation of:

> it runs on your machine, your data stays with you, and any model can read it

I don’t think people fully appreciate the tension in those claims, especially when the model most area reaching for is Claude or GPT or Gemini. I think these things need more precise language about where data actually goes and what tradeoffs users are implicitly accepting.

If devices were truly private, we could simply set our mics to always-on and massive Personal Wikis would build themselves over time. Imagine that, an autobiography for everyone. Of course the downside is massive, arguably useless storage for humans. Would be pretty valuable training data though.

This is awesome, dude. I love it. One of my personal points of friction is that I want almost all of my life to be public in whichever way it is, but I don't want to subject my friends to that without asking, and my life is pretty intertwined with that of my friends. I suppose I could add a new namespace and protect it, but for now I just keep my private notes in my Google Drive and my public notes on my blog. My blog etc. is in Mediawiki and I expressly like the interwiki linking form so it's seamless what's in the Wikimedia universe. The best part about the interwiki thing is that anything from the Wikimedia world can directly be hotlinked on your wiki too. That's really fun.

I do like the idea of building up this history of people, and maybe when my parents pass I'll make theirs public and so on. Great work, dude! I love it.

This hits a really compelling middle ground between journaling, genealogy and lifelogging

> Private by default > Your wiki and archive live on your machine. Nothing is stored remotely.

Sure, the wiki is private. However, in the process your data is being uploaded straight to an AI company. Of course local LLMs exist but that’s seemingly not supported here and I think the statement on privacy could be clearer.

I wish all of this technology could have been around when my grandparents were still alive. :-(

The family has a TON of videos and photos, but no resource to guide us through what is what.

I actually spent a weekend last yr doing something similar. Went through a box of old photos with my dad and wrote things down before the stories were lost. Never thought to structure it as a wiki though. Way better than the Google doc I ended up with.

The bank transaction + location cross referencing to figure out which restaurants you went to is pretty cool. Would be great if this could pull in social media exports too. Point it at your X, IG, FB archives, let it draft pages/content from that.

Any plan for a timeline view? Wiki format works well for depth but sometimes you just want to scroll through a year.

I do something similar to a personal encyclopedia but using org-roam. I don’t use an LLM yet to do any work but eventually i plan to use a local model to correlate things and pull together things that were not manually connected. Also I’m glad that LLMs can easily parse org docs so that if any future family member wanted to look through they wouldnt have to be familiar with emacs esoteric conventions.

Amazing work there @jrmyphlmn . Very recently I was thinking about how to preserve photographs I have collected over last 10 years in my external drive and instagram and unchecked SSD cards. Time to weave them all together. Bonus for me to be the 100th github starer on your repo

I have a friend whose grandma wrote a book about their family. She printed 50 or so copies of it. Not a chart-topping best seller, but each one is a cherished collector's item.

Right now, my wife and I are sticking to annual photo albums. They're already fun to flip through and we're not even that old yet.

I'm like, "Here's all of the obituaries," and Claude is like, "I'll make all the pages of all of the people and link them together." Pretty neat.

It's like Facebook meets Wikipedia

I quite love this idea. Both of my grandfathers died last year and going through their early memories was amazing. I would love to be able to preserve that and make it shareable with the rest of my family.

Nice work!

This is very interesting. As a person who meticulously daily diaries into Obsidian, my hope is to have a relatively accurate look-back at things I've done in the past. And having a Wiki to show that, feel very interesting now!

And I just taught Claude to read the Discussion notes on a page, and to make updates to the page accordingly...

This is so inspiring, thank you for writing it. I’ve been wanting something to track my daughters life and this is exactly what I need!

This reminds me a bit of the Vannevar Bush's Memex; what he'd really hoped it would become.

I like the idea. I like the way it uses existing framework. If I was going to offer a suggestion, I would try to incorporate a way to use local inference ( or is that accomplished through opencode? I have not used it yet so I don't really know ).

I've been looking for a solution for this problem for a long time, and this is a particularly innovative approach.

I'll look into this more: Most appreciated, thank you.

This is really neat! Beyond being a personal encyclopedia, remember the Spotify documentary where each episode was someone else's POV? I'd love to document a trip with friends and everyone else to do the same and see/compare what everyone experienced!

I love the idea.

Each year I have the wife take curated photos from our shared accounts with an overview of the event photographed.

This is then bound into a 1/2 inch book with 50 pages. We now have a dozen years of annualized memories that we can pass around with physical access.

She has done this for others with great success. The personal touches make it well worth what she charges.

Beautiful idea, and well structured website. Thanks a lot for building it.

this is incredible, I have been thinking about this exact project for quite some time but a little wary of which approach I might take. Thanks for posting this.

I wanted to do exactly that with a bunch of old pictures and you beat me to it. Love it!

That is actually pretty cool. I started doing that with the photo collections of family members, but only to add explanations to the metadata of the pictures. I might reconsider that approach now.

MediaWiki mentioned!

I started running an private MediaWiki instance during the pandemic as I wanted something with a nice editing experience rather than editing markdown documents. I almost went with a self-hosted Confluence instance :P

Mediawiki is very very nice and it has a lot of cool features i've been loving over the years.

One of the things i like the most is the ability to embed a PDF document so that it's both downloadable and browsable from the wiki page itself (it embeds the browser pdf engine).

This means that i can, say, have a page for my microwave oven and have its user manual easily available.

Lately I've been thinking how to connect that with some LLM, most likely there's a chance to do some interesting things :)

A good story I stopped reading when it became agentic.

The product naming is becoming harassment. When it's in the title, at least we know. When it's in the intro, we know what we are getting into.

What really pinch is that this project could have easily been done with some scripting, open sourced, and anyone could do it at zero cost, with total privacy.

What an absolutely delightful project. This put a smile on my face. Thank you.

> So I started pointing Claude Code at other data exports. My Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp archives held around 100k messages and a couple thousand voice notes exchanged with close friends over a decade.

> The model traced the arc of our friendships through the messages, pulled out the life episodes we had talked each other through, and wove them into multiple pages that read like it was written by someone who knew us both. When I shared the pages with my friends, they wanted to read every single one.

This is a stunning violation of the privacy of your friends.

If someone uploaded every single private conversation I had had with them to Anthropic, they would no longer be my friend.

I've gone the polar opposite route and started printing photos that means things to me, and putting them into photo albums

This is beautiful, lovely, and inspirational. Really nice of you to open the source. Give me the inspiration to try it out from there.

Disappointed because I thought this was about building a personal alternative to Wikipedia.

Great project! I can also see other use cases; investigative journalist or criminal investigators using this to create a detailed profile of persons (eg Epstein files), authors setting up detailed profiles of fictional characters for stories.

Overall this is a neat result, and the interviews are a nice part of the process. I've tried to (on occasion) make a habit of asking about more (mundane) details from my elders. But knowing what to do with that data...

And that brings me to my point. I've been thinking a lot lately about digital legacy. When I was a kid, it was neat to see photo books that showed my parents as kids, living their lives, having fun. Though those memories stand out to me, it's not something you revisit often. With digital memories, you can share them constantly, in great quantities. But what if you want them to stick around?

First, I think in early 2000s brain, and I think about how I've got domain names and web sites, and some of them include family photos and forums. The only way to keep them around is some kind of durable host, and a way for someone interested to get to that hosted data. Cloud + domain names = unmaintained software but subscription-based expense in perpetuity.

What about a box? A server you could plug in anywhere, uses dynamic DNS to "hook in" to the internet, and you just maintain a domain name. You could update it while you're alive, but eventually it would just be a "photo book" people could choose to pass around and connect if they so wished. And the domain name could be pre-paid for a while, but eventually die, many years after you.

Now whether you need/want a digital legacy is probably more a question of ego, and how much those you leave behind want a way to revisit memories of your life and the lives of those you touched. But if you do want that, it's not as easy as printing out a photo book, or printing photos and sliding them behind those plastic sleeves, and passing that from household to household.

I'm currently in the very early stages of going through several DVDs worth of digital photos my late grandmother took, and thinking of ways to organize them and share them with my family. And I'm wondering if I can make whatever I come up with "reasonably" durable.

This is beautiful, and incredibly polished. Thank you.

That sounds great!

This chap made it a labor of love.

Fantastic idea!

I have been thinking about the difference between 'consumption' and 'creation' style hobbies lately. Spending time drinking different coffee beans, or collecting sneakers, I would call 'consumptive'. Writing a software package, or knitting would be creative. I find that its useful to me to keep a balance between these in my life.

This project I thought was a nice creative project. But then, as with all creative projects, I get the nagging question - who is going to use/read/wear the outputs of this work? But that's not really the point for a hobby is it? My conclusion: I should be less negative :D

I built something very broadly similar approximately 20 years ago.

Then I forgot about it. It’s not like the data is lost, but availability is. Bringing it back up is a pain. I could probably do it in a full day of work.

What I learned: Static HTML export on every change by default is a must. I don’t think HTML will cease to be easily readable in our lifetimes.

For longevity, which is a consideration in such a project, one might prefer something based on Markdown files, like https://github.com/Linbreux/wikmd to Mediawiki, which uses a database. Then again it does support sqlite, which is open source, so it is not a big deal.

> After I found out I could also link to the real Wikipedia

It's magical watching people learn about hyperlinks. Even technical people don't always seem to know the power of a string that says, "Go to this server and fetch this document". Love it

So this is why RAM prices are through the roof. (JK, this is cool)

This plus messaging and you could kill Facebook

You’re gonna really wish you recorded the voice of your grandma telling those tales.

Video >photo >audio >text

What a lovely project! What about using a personal, family wiki to collectively edit, update family related infos, would that work? Anyone attempted something like that?

I like my memories ephemeral and fragile. Reading AI-generated articles about my loved ones in the typical apathetic Wikipedia tone sounds like a deeply unnerving experience to me.

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