Armchair Genealogy - Family Tree & History

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Genealogy Guy 0:16
You don't always get chance to sit down with people that you love, sometimes life, distance or even time zones get in the way, but last year, I discovered a platform called remento. It's a brilliant way to capture stories, memories and voices from anywhere in the world. You set the questions your loved ones answer them and in their own time as well, just by speaking into their phone, and what unfolds can be more meaningful than you ever expected. To tell us more. I'm joined today by one of the creative minds behind it all. Which was Charlie Greene. Welcome along, Charlie.

Charlie Greene- Remento 0:51
The pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Genealogy Guy 0:54
Could you start by sharing the personal story that inspired remento, what happened in the family that sparked this idea?

Charlie Greene- Remento 1:01
No, I'd love to. I often joke that I had the tremendous benefit of growing up with two parents who were freakishly obsessed with the home video camcorder. As a result of that obsession I have. It's actually close to 100 hours of recordings from the first decade of my childhood, all of the kind of milestone moments, the births and the birthdays and the graduations and the recitals, so lucky, yeah, and it's all content. That's a kind of totally different level of meaning. In the years after my dad passed away, just a couple days after my 10th birthday, all that video became, you know, the way that we we as a family, kept his memory alive. And I remember as a 12 year old, two years after he passed, going through this process of digitizing all of that content and being really surprised about what within that collection actually mattered the most. And it wasn't the milestone moments, you know, the births and the birthdays and the graduations and the recitals. It was, is actually just the moments of him being himself, you know, the moments that really captured his essence in a way that, you know, a photo, of course, really, really never could have. I've got a video of him, you know, holding me in his arms for the first time the day I was born as Kodak, and as milestone of a moment as you could imagine. And actually, one of the videos that I probably treasure most of any that I've ever that I've ever had access to, is a video that my mom took of him right before they left for the hospital on the day I was born, and and he's looking at my mom, explaining how nervous he is that he has not connected the car seat to the back of the car in the right way. And it's just such a human moment where he's being himself and he's talking about it. Talking about an experience that, at the time, was about to shape his life. And well, flash forward, you know, a little over a decade later, my mom ends up getting diagnosed with stage three lung cancer, and it was in that moment that it became pretty clear there's a good chance that my future kids probably wouldn't have a chance to meet either of their grandparents. And I moved up to Portland Maine, in the US, where my mom, my mom was living, and I remember scrolling through my phone and seeing the time, you know, 10s of 1000s of photos and 1000s of videos, and being absolutely blown away that I couldn't find a single video of her that was longer than 10 seconds from the last 15 years I had, I had a video of her blowing out the candles on every cake we had made her and every Thanksgiving turkey she had carved for us. But on my phone, I couldn't find a video anywhere close to as meaningful as a video I grew up with from my dad, from, you know, that day that I was born, and so we did something in that moment that I don't think many people have done before, which was we sat down and set out to record some of her stories. And the reason why I don't think a lot of people have done this is because it was a tremendous amount of work. You know, I went out and I I sourced a bunch of questions to ask. I poured through her old photo albums from her childhood, I pulled together kind of a program to sit down and use to ask her questions, and I remember being just absolutely blown away by how much there was to learn about someone that I really thought I knew everything about. I thought I get the stories that, you know, we roll our eyes when we hear because we've heard them so many times, and I heard almost exclusively, net new things about her childhood and her career and her relationship with my dad that you know, I had never known. And I remember asking her, like, Mom, why? Why on earth have you never talked about this before? And her response was so simple, she just said, I didn't think you were interested. And it was in that response that I found myself ultimately spending a lot of time thinking about this open question of, why is it that so few of us actually take the time to discover the moments and memories that shape the people we love, particularly our parents and grandparents, and why also, is it that we don't take. Take the opportunity to preserve those memories and stories while we still have time. And so what we set out to do with Remento was to try to solve that problem, to take this internal desire that so many of us have to become more connected to the people that brought us into this world, and of course, to also document those stories for the future, for ourselves and for our families. Going forward,

Genealogy Guy 5:23
when you started recording the conversations with your mom, did you imagine at the time that it would involve evolve into something like Remento, or was it just after the event?

Charlie Greene- Remento 5:32
I couldn't have imagined it less. No, it was. It was a moment in our family, frankly, of panic. You know, we we had no idea what was going to come next, and when I sat down with my mom, it was purely out of self interest. What I wanted to do was create something for my kids. Of course, I didn't have kids at the time, but I wanted them to be able to hear her voice. And I'll never forget one of the one of the really surprising things about that experience was the smile on my mom's face as she tells the story. And what I've come to since appreciate is that actually asking someone to tell their story is a gift, and in turn, the act of sharing your story reciprocating is a gift right back to your family. And there are very few things that we as humans do that provide gifts in both directions. And so what we're trying to do at remento is effectively get people out of their own way and take on a project that, because of our technology, doesn't actually feel like a project at all.

Genealogy Guy 6:30
How did you go from something that was so ,so deeply personal as a family project to build a full platform?

Charlie Greene- Remento 6:37
Well we focused on our customers from the very beginning, our first customer was my mom, and we thought to ourselves, when I thought to myself, as I was doing this experience with my mom, is what would it take for the process of doing what I had just done with my mom to be easier? And ultimately, what we realized was that there were a lot of different things that we could do, and so we were ruthless in our prioritization of where we wanted to focus our time and our attention, and we ultimately built our way into a platform that would allow us to be able to make the process of going from wanting someone's stories documented to having them in a book that includes their voice created without writing a word in a way that doesn't require a lot of work. And the way we ultimately were able to do that was by talking about why this is important and and ultimately, what we found as we talked to people, whether they were prospective customers, you know, or investors, was that for almost everyone we talked about, they either thought to themselves, you know, there's someone in my life I wish I would do this with, or I wish I could have done this with. And I think, you know, when you're building a business and you can find a way to make it, you know, relatable to people, it can really make a huge difference.

Genealogy Guy 7:59
Remento isn't just a tool. It's really an experience. How intentional was the emotional design when he was putting the thing together?

Charlie Greene- Remento 8:07
I love the question. Very intentional for the person who wants to create a book of their parents stories, it's possible today. It was possible 10 years ago. It was possible 30 years ago. It just required a tremendous amount of effort, either by you, which would take your time, or by someone else, which, generally speaking, would take your money. And what we believed was that there must be another way to be able to design this process. But what we knew is that we would face a massive hurdle with people starting and not completing the experience, because no matter how you set up, the prospect of documenting your stories there, there is time that is going to be involved in going from the beginning to the end. We think that we've done that in just about the least effort, full capacity, but ultimately, you have to be willing to share your stories. And what we found from our customers was, as soon as someone shared their stories and heard from at least one member of their family that what had been shared was relevant and it mattered and it taught them something, and for that reason, it was meaningful. The likelihood of that storyteller sharing a second and a third and a fourth story dramatically changed. And so it was from that insight that we realized that actually the product of remento would not be the book at the end of the journey, but actually our core product is the journey itself. And that's the reason why when people talk about romantic with their friends and family, they don't talk about the eight by 10 inch physical, hardcover, color printed book printed on double thick paper designed to stand the test of time. Although we love our books and what they talk about is the feeling of waking up on a Wednesday morning. Are looking at their phone and hearing their mom talk about a piece of her childhood that they've never heard before, and realizing that not only is that an insight that they can share with their family today, but knowing that in 30 or 50 or 70 or 100 years in the future that that insight, that story you know is never going to be lost. And that's a that's a really powerful feeling to be able to experience

Genealogy Guy 10:26
if you were bumping into somebody in an elevator. I'm trying to keep it short you say, So talk us through from prompt to print, how. How does Remento work?

Charlie Greene- Remento 10:37
I love an alliteration. So from prompt to print that might have to end up on our website. That's great. Mell we designed Remento to be as simple as possible. Every week we'll send your storyteller a prompt about their past. It can either be a prompt from our question bank or a photograph that someone in your family uploads. Your storyteller then receives that prompt via either text message or email, they in three taps, can record their story right from their favorite device. No downloads, no apps, no logins. When they're done, they either hit submit or redo, and if they hit submit, Remento goes to work and will take their recording and will turn it into a polished narrative that you can then manipulate in any way that you want, changing the text, changing the style, changing the tone, and then ultimately, all of those stories are aggregated into a fully customizable book that you can print out and share with your friends and family that is full of QR codes that when you scan will play the recording that was used to write each chapter. So for your for your storyteller, whether that's you or a member of your family, it is a book about your or their past that writes itself, and for that person's family, it is all of their stories at their fingertips, as well as their voice.

Genealogy Guy 12:03
The QR tag, I think is a wonderful touch. Then my technical question is, once it's up and loaded onto the cloud, and people can just use the phone and fire it back, and they can listen to it, can they download it in case, in case, anything ever happened to Remento, or they moved servers, or the server went down. You said, can they have a backup of it?

Charlie Greene- Remento 12:22
Our content is way, way too important. I should say, actually, your content is way, way too important to ever be relying on any company, whether it's remento or, for that matter, for Google or Apple. And that's the reason, when you have content that matters, you must save it to places other than the single place that it was created. So anything that exists on Memento can be downloaded directly to your device. It can then be uploaded to your own cloud account, and you own all of the content created in perpetuity, and it will only ever be available within Remento to people who you explicitly invite.

Genealogy Guy 13:05
That's fantastic to hear, because it's everyone's everyone's so worried about now, where's the data going? And to hear that it's, it's just, it's just within the family and who you choose. What do users say about hearing someone's voice preserved in a book. What does that add emotionally?

Charlie Greene- Remento 13:23
Well, the first thing I would say is that anything is better than nothing. If all you have from a parent is a letter that they wrote you on your first birthday, I promise you that letter means something deeply important to you. If all you have is a voicemail from a grandparent. You will cherish that voicemail more than any other voicemail you've ever received. What our what our customers tell us is they love being able to read the stories because that book sits on their table. They can open it. They can read about their mom's childhood, their dad's career, their grandparents upbringing. Any of these stories can come to life through the text, but if you just think to yourself of someone you love who's no longer with us, you know well, as well as I do, that there is nothing nothing like watching a video that includes both their voice as well as the visual of them talking, the sound of their laughter, the look that they make as they smile. You know, it is that content that is so powerful when it comes to being able to remember the people that we love, as well as being able to document their stories in real time. You know, we hear from customers all the time who are finding great use of our platform after someone has passed away, but the vast majority of our customers are enjoying their product and sharing our product and referring our product, not because someone has passed away, but because through remento, they've been able to learn something about people in their lives that they never. knew. So for anyone who's thinking, Remento would be a great thing to do with my parents once they get older, you know what I would encourage you to say is, there's, there is no time like the present, because plenty of us don't have as long as we think we do, first of all, but the second thing is, there's, there's nothing greater than learning things about your family while you still have time, because it creates an opportunity to grow closer and better understand yourself by way of the stories of others. And I know I'm preaching to the choir within with a genealogist, so I imagine there'll be a lot of perhaps a lot of agreement for that point among among your community,

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Armchairgenealogy.com for generations of all ages,

Genealogy Guy 15:40
Let's grab a short break from listening to Charlie Greene talking about why Remento was created for gathering family history stories, which sort of leads me into so if you're thinking about diving into your family history, but not sure where to begin, you're not alone, but it's easier than you might think. Start with yourself, write down what you know, names, birthplaces, dates. Then talk to your relatives those living memories. They're gold dust because they are true memories from a main source. Once you've gathered those basics, move to free tools like familysearch.org, or ancestry trial to start building your tree, and here's one of the secrets that a lot of people just overlook. Don't worry about filling in every leaf right away. Genealogy is not a race, it's a journey. Each name is a doorway to a story, and every question you ask brings you closer to understanding your place in the world and the family. So grab a notebook, grab your phone, open your heart and let the past introduce itself and on that. Let's go back to the conversation I had with Charlie Greene from Remento And why collecting family stories is so important in family history. Now, recently you appeared on Shark Tank, which is the American version of what we get called Dragon's Den here in the UK. How did it feel pitching something that's so personal on a TV channel in front of some potential investors? What did that feel like?

Charlie Greene- Remento 17:16
Well, it was surreal. I think anyone who's been on Dragon's Den or shark tank can appreciate that it's an odd context to share. You know, the story behind your business. You know, what I'll say is, I think my understanding is that both shows are very authentic to what is seen on television. They're highly condensed, but there's not a lot of production that goes into making the pitch any different than it would be if you were actually just standing in that room pitching real investors. So, you know, I think my biggest takeaway from that experience was that for anyone who has a business that they're excited to be able to talk about, you know, it always makes sense to tell the story of your why. As humans, we remember information through story data is only relevant when it's told within the context of a story. And so from my perspective, what was really important going in was making sure that the sharks knew why this was important to me. Because I think if they could understand why it was important to me, they could see how it can be important to them too. So it took a while to develop the confidence to be able to go in and be vulnerable about my own story, but I think what in turn, came of that experience was hopefully an honest, authentic reflection of why what we're building matters in a way that allowed the sharks who were sitting there to understand how it could matter in their own personal, family's life. And you know, we did walk away with investment, but I also think we walked away with some new customers as well, and and that, yeah, that was really, really exciting to me.

Genealogy Guy 18:47
Now Mark Cuban ended up backingn Remento. So what do you think it was that connected with him, that your pitch, like made him realize, Wow, this, this is such a good, good project.

Charlie Greene- Remento 18:59
I think, generally speaking, the thing entrepreneurs need to think about when they're starting a business is especially, especially consumer businesses. Is the product that I've created solving a real problem in the market, and in the way that it's solving that problem, is the positioning going to be set up in a way that would compel people to buy it? I think it's really hard to get excited about a product, especially a consumer product that you yourself would not be excited to buy. And what I think Mark really understood, as well as some of the other sharks, is that family stories are important. They're wonderful. And I think a lot of people aspire to be the person within their family that miraculously finds time to prioritize this kind of work. A lot of people aspirationally wish they spent more time documenting memories, learning about their history, growing closer with their relatives. But we're busy. We're busy, and in 2025 we're more distracted than we've ever been. I think what Mark realized as. A technologist himself as an entrepreneur, is that the promise of artificial intelligence is tremendous as it relates to allowing human beings to do things that we never had time to do before. And as a investor and technologist, he spends a lot of time looking at products that are Artificial Intelligence rich, but haven't yet actually found a way to increase the human experience in a significant or meaningful way. And at Remento, we are artificial intelligence optimists, but we're very focused on integrating that technology in a way that is purely and specifically focused on allowing our customers to do something that five years ago, they wouldn't have the ability to have done themselves. And so, yeah, what I think Mark saw was a way of being able to use technology that meaningfully impacts the human experience, and does so in a way that can bring families together at a time where so much of the technology that fills our world may not actually be doing so

Genealogy Guy 21:05
Do you see Remento growing beyond family stories, maybe oral history projects or memoir books, or even into education.

Charlie Greene- Remento 21:13
I certainly do. Yeah, I mean, the underlying technology that we've built is capable of being able to serve many different use cases, beyond the use case that we're focused on right now. And what I will say is the vast majority of people in this country and in countries around the world will in the next 20 years, lose a parent, and many of them will not have a single video of that person. And what we're focused on doing at Remento is making sure that that's never the case going forward. So from my perspective, I am incredibly bullish on many different things that we could go do, and we have a tremendous opportunity to do a lot of positive impact within the category that we're currently focused so we're going to stay really focused on this space for now and then. To your point, yeah, we'll certainly be branching into different use cases.

Genealogy Guy 22:07
That sort of leads me on to, are there any new features or collaborations you're excited about that you can share with us? At the moment.

Charlie Greene- Remento 22:14
There are, yeah, for customers who are in the US, we're piloting a new partnership with a company called Legacy box that streamlines the process of digitizing old photos. You know, we hear from so many of our customers. My mom's doing Remento and she loves it, and I'd love to add photos, but all my photos are in her attic, and that is a whole project to be able to work through. And the reality is is that big project is not going away, and it's either going to be your mom's project or it'll become your dad's project. And eventually, if it doesn't become their project, it'll become your project. And so what a lot of our customers are taking advantage of is, when you buy Remento in the States, now you can add on a legacy box, which, when you do, will send either you or them a physical box to add your photos into. We'll digitize those photos to you and add them directly to your mento account. So every week, instead of responding to an open ended question, they can actually tell the story behind a photo, which renders a book of their stories about photographs making it so that you never have to wonder in the future, who was in that photo standing next to mom during her childhood. So we're really excited about that, because we know that so many families have these large collections of physical assets, and we think being able to bring meaning to those those photographs is a is a very compelling way to be able to collect reflections about lived experiences.

Genealogy Guy 23:41
You've mentioned this a little bit earlier, but I just want to revisit the question, because it's in my list, and it's sort of, I just want to go a bit deeper. What do you personally hope people take away from using Remento? What's, what's the deeper legacy you're building?

Charlie Greene- Remento 23:54
I think, in communities around the world, what it means to be a daughter or a son or grandson or granddaughter is different, and I think technology has an incredible opportunity to shape that experience. And the reality is, is that we in a globalized world, many of us are less connected to our families than we were a decade, two decades, almost certainly a century ago. And what I hope is that the same technology that, in so many respects, actively pulls people away from their families by distracting them, by refocusing them from things that actually can bring them happiness and joy, so that that same technology can actually help you see your family in a new light, that rather than spending two or three hours of your day passively consuming social media content on Instagram or on Tiktok, you're actually spending time engaging. In consuming the stories of your own family. What if, rather than sitting down to watch a documentary about a former prime minister or president or civil rights leader, you were sitting down to watch a documentary of your own family, and what if that documentary was created for you in a completely autonomous way, without having to pay anything other than a relatively small subscription to a software company that's focused on creating that content in the first place. So part of the your question is is very difficult for me to answer, because the future of storytelling and bringing life stories to life will be very dependent on how technology enables us to do that, to be able to build worlds around past memories. What we want to make sure, though, is that anyone who's going to be looking in five or 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 or 100 years to bring someone they love to life in a way that has never before been technologically possible. Is not limited by the fact that five or 10 or 50 or 100 years ago, they didn't take the opportunity to document those stories because because it is with that data, it is with those stories recorded that we will be able to fully take take advantage of all of the beauty and amazing capability that will exist in the future.

Genealogy Guy 26:25
Well, I think you did a fantastic job of answering a very difficult question. So, and it's very clear you you're looking always to the future, one of my last questions, and this will, this will make you think, if, if you could hand your own Memento book to your future grandchildren, what's one story you'd want to make sure was in that book,

Charlie Greene- Remento 26:44
The photograph that I would share with them and the story associated with it would be the photo of my daughter on the day that she was born. And that might get political if I end up having multiple kids. So we'll have to probably do a couple of these, one for each of them. But I remember in that moment, you know, thinking a lot about what it meant to be able to bring someone into this world to do that alongside my wife and I spent a lot of time in that moment thinking about how similar in many respects, of an experience that would have been for both my mom and my dad. What was so interesting about that moment was the degree to which I felt connected to both of them in that moment, in part because my mom was down the hall, and also in part because I hadn't seen my dad in 20 years. But there was something about the circle of life what felt like almost a pre predestined fate that felt like it really brought our family together in a beautiful way, and having recorded that story behind that photo, it's something that I had, something that I hope my daughter appreciates. It's something that I hope the rest of my family appreciates, and frankly, it's something that I'm always going to appreciate. Knowing what it was like for me in that moment to feel the way that I did and be able to reflect back on that.

Genealogy Guy 28:00
Your hitting the nail on the head. It's about the memories you have of that moment when you retell it to someone else, you conjure up those memories, and that's what you're passing on, is those memories. Unfortunately, I'd love to just carry on talking about tech and as I always do with my guests, but in the meantime, where should people just go, are you on socials? Have you got websites? Where's the best place for people to just hit remento and go, right? I'm going to start looking at this.

Charlie Greene- Remento 28:28
We're all over the place. We're in all the places. So the company is called Remento. It's like 'Remember' and 'Memento' combined into one. Search us on Google. You can go to our website. Our website is remento.co, we're on Facebook, we're on Instagram, and our product is available for for 99 US dollars, British pricing coming soon, but we do ship our books to the UK. And you know, for anyone that has someone in their lives that they would love to be able to celebrate with the gift of remento, or who they themselves have a belief would, by way of documenting their own stories, be able to give a gift to their family? You know, we're we're here to make that journey a little bit more accessible and hopefully a lot more meaningful.

Genealogy Guy 29:14
I can certainly echo because I bought subscriptions to it, because I wanted to try it out. And that's why I wanted you to be on on the episode, because it does work. It works so well, even if you're just not interested in technology, you just have to, like, they just have to see the message and press record. And the editing is just great, because it takes out all the ums and ahs and they because they people panic and go, I've got to get it perfect? No, you haven't the AI does a really good job of taking all those out for you. So you actually sound as though, wow, you've actually wrote a book. It's phenomenal. It's a really good platform.

Charlie Greene- Remento 29:51
Well, no, I so appreciate you saying that. Thank you. Thank you for that.

Genealogy Guy 29:54
Well once again, thank you very much. Charlie Greene from Remento, and then I shall look forward to seeing. Further developments, because there's all this excited stuff, as you've already mentioned, with AI, and that's it's going to be a very, very interesting time for storytellers, for genealogists, for people who just want to capture family history. I'm very excited about the whole the whole gambit of AI, and I know a lot of people are very nervous, but all I can see is like how much it's going to bring things to life and connect people faster.

Charlie Greene- Remento 30:24
I couldn't agree more.

Genealogy Guy 30:26
And thanks there to Charlie Greeen from Remento. And if you want to find out more about recording family history, using their system and turning it into a book, then visit remento.co until the next episode. Best wishes from me, the genealogy guy, happy and productive research.

Jingle 30:46
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai