Digital Family History vs Printed: The Future of Family Storytelling

Andrew Ronald

Simirity Founder | Father of two

3rd June, 2025

Preserving family history matters deeply to most of us, so it’s worth considering how best to capture and share our stories. For years, our family created printed books filled with photos, stories, and memories that detailed our experiences together. The arrival of each book was always an exciting moment—until it inevitably found its way to the bookshelf and was forgotten about.

It’s such a shame to have rich family history sitting idly on bookshelves, especially stories that took effort to compile and meant so much when we first put them together. Could a digital approach actually improve how we preserve family stories? More importantly, might it help make our family history more accessible and engaging for all generations—from elderly relatives to children who’ve never shown interest in dusty history books?

In this article, we’ll compare digital family history with printed accounts, exploring which approach truly serves families best when it comes to preserving and sharing what matters most.

What Most Family History Books Actually Contain

Before we compare digital and printed approaches, let’s be honest about what most family history books actually contain. Most of the families that we surveyed admit that they’re predominantly photo collections with brief captions including dates, names, locations, and perhaps a sentence or two about what’s happening in each image. The odd family recipe or scanned letter might be included, but these books aren’t filled with detailed stories documenting family’s experiences.

Skipping stories about family history is unfortunate because a great deal is being missed. Many moments never get captured in photos:

• The conversations that you really appreciated.
• The challenges that family members overcame.
• The thoughts, ideas and learnings that arise in daily life.

These meaningful stories, and so many more, remain unrecorded because they happened between camera clicks.

Research shows that sharing stories that go beyond photos has 5 powerful benefits for families. So it really is something worth considering as you preserve your family’s history.

What Digital Family History Actually Means

“Digital family history” is so much more than simply uploading photos online instead of in printed albums. In fact, we’ve outlined 8 ways to record family history, and seven of them are digital solutions.

What makes digital approaches fundamentally different is their ability to include media files that simply can’t be added to printed books.

The Printed Past vs. Digital Future

Until recently, printed books like MyCanvas made perfect sense for preserving family history. Families lived closer together, gathered regularly, and sharing memories meant pulling a book from the shelf during Sunday visits or family celebrations.

But family life has changed dramatically. We’re scattered across different cities and countries, juggling busy schedules across time zones, and raising children who may see their grandparents once a year—if they’re lucky.

This new reality exposes the limitations of printed family history. While beautiful and meaningful, books simply weren’t designed for modern families who need their stories to travel, evolve, and remain accessible despite the distances between them.

Let’s examine how digital alternatives address these challenges.

Head-to-Head Comparison: Three Key Battlegrounds

You can compare printed books to digital alternatives in many ways, but here are the three that we feel are most important.

1. Living Stories vs. Static Pages

Printed books can only tell family stories through photos and text—beautiful, but ultimately static. You get one version of events, captured in that moment, never to evolve or expand.

Digital family history changes everything.

Your stories can include your grandmother’s voice telling her wedding tale, a video of your toddler’s first steps, or even the playlist that defined your teenage years. These aren’t just stories—they’re experiences that let future generations truly understand who their family was.

But here’s where digital really wins: it doesn’t sit forgotten on a shelf. Digital stories can weave themselves into your daily life through gentle reminders, just like when Google Photos resurfaces old pictures.

Just imagine your family receiving a reminder about grandad’s war experiences on Remembrance Day, or childhood tales appearing on your children’s birthdays. That’s the kind of added value digital family history can provide.

The future of family storytelling is interactive, not static—and it lives where your family actually spends their time. If we want our children to connect with family history, we need to meet them where they are: on their devices, not dusty bookshelves. Digital stories can capture young attention in ways printed books cannot.

2. Global Connection vs. Physical Boundaries

Here’s where printed family history shows its biggest limitation: it exists in one place, accessible to one person at a time. The family albums sitting in my house are useless to my parents overseas, to family living in another city, or to other relatives who would enjoy exploring our family’s history.

Digital family history changes this completely.

Everyone gets equal access from every corner of the globe, simultaneously if they choose. Your mum in Manchester and your brother in Toronto can browse the same stories at the same moment—family storytelling should have no borders.

But access is just the beginning. Once everyone can reach your family stories, something magical happens: conversations transform. Instead of the usual predictable catch-ups about work and weather, families start discussing grandparents’ adventures, how parents met, and childhood memories that spark new perspectives.

I’ve witnessed this transformation firsthand. Digital family history doesn’t just preserve the past—it creates opportunities for relatives to add their own memories and comments, building richer stories together. Meanwhile, those books we printed are sitting quieting, waiting for someone to remember they exist…

3. Permanent Preservation vs. Vulnerable Archives

Many families choose printed books, believing they’re somehow “safer” than digital alternatives. But recent events tell a different story. The families who lost everything in the LA wildfires didn’t just lose their homes—they lost irreplaceable photo albums, handwritten letters, and decades of carefully preserved family history in an instant.

With reliable cloud servers and automatic backups, digital stories exist simultaneously in multiple secure locations. There’s no single point of failure, no risk of one disaster wiping out your entire family legacy.

And time itself works against printed materials. Pages yellow, binding loosens, and photographs fade. Digital stories remain as vibrant as the day you created them, and they actually improve over time as new technologies make them even more engaging for future generations.

Why the Future Favors Digital Family History

The real benefit of digital family history isn’t convenience—it’s connection.

Digital storytelling enables you to engage family of all ages in conversations around your shared past, even when you live miles apart.

Today’s children and teenagers expect interactive, accessible content that’s delivered to them on their smartphones and tablets. It’s unlikely that they’ll seek out family history books, but they might engage with stories that appear naturally in their daily digital lives.

Imagine your family’s future, where:

• Grandparents share voice recordings about their life experiences, connecting with grandchildren whom they rarely see.
• Teenagers discover their parents’ pre-children adventures through engaging digital stories.
• Parents learn new perspectives about their own upbringing as their parents bring new stories to light.

This cross-generational storytelling creates something beautiful—a truly shared family experience where everyone contributes and everyone belongs.

If you want your family’s history to become a living, connecting force rather than archived memories, the future is undeniably digital.

Simirity: Your Digital Family History Partner

We’re a family business, and this is our story. Living across different countries, we experienced firsthand how challenging it can be to maintain meaningful connections with extended family. We tried the usual apps and tools, but nothing quite captured what we were looking for—something that could preserve our family history while genuinely bringing us closer together.

That’s why we created Simirity. We built it to be the ideal partner for families who want to stay connected across any distance while preserving the stories that matter most. Here’s how Simirity compares to the alternative most families use.

Ready to see digital family storytelling in action? Explore our demo account and imagine how your family could benefit from Simirity

Common Digital Family History Hesitations

The benefits of digital family history are clear, but benefits don’t address the practical worries that keep families hesitant. Let’s address some of the most common concerns.

• What if strangers access our family photos and stories? Reputable digital family history platforms operate like private family vaults, not social media. Your stories remain visible only to family members you specifically invite—no public access, no strangers browsing your memories.
• How do I know my children’s images are safe online? Look for platforms that offer family-only sharing with granular privacy controls. You should be able to manage children’s accounts and control exactly who sees what content.
• Will companies sell our family data to advertisers? Choose platforms with clear “no advertising” policies and transparent privacy practices. Family-focused companies understand that trust is everything—selling your data is bad for business!
• My elderly parents can barely use their phones—how will they manage this? The best platforms are designed with less tech-savvy people in mind. Once set up, administrative features mean those who are struggling can be helped by their family. And features like voice recordings, make it easy for them to catch a moments from the past without even having to touch a keyboard.
• How do I know this platform will still exist in 20 years? While no one can guarantee any company’s future, family-focused businesses tend to be stable because they serve such an important need. These are long-term businesses, not some social media trend.
• Digital feels impersonal compared to holding a real book. We agree that books are special, but that doesn’t mean that digital is impersonal. In fact, it can enhance it. For example, imagine hearing your parents’ voices recounting their wedding day or talking about when you were a child—written text and photos in a page cannot compete with this.
• My kids already spend too much time on screens… Let’s be honest here, it’s unlikely they’re going to become addicted to looking at their family history. A good outcome would be for them to show an interest in the new stories being shared and explore some of the historical ones, possibly inspired by their parents. But it’s not all about consuming other stories—they might develop some creative digital skills by creating their own stories to share with family on their home. That’s arguably a far better use of their time than endless scrolling in YouTube.

These are exactly the concerns we had in mind when we built Simirity. As a family business, we understand the hesitations because we’ve felt them ourselves. That’s why Simirity was designed specifically to address these worries—with flexible privacy controls, simple interfaces that work for all generations, and features that make digital storytelling feel warm and personal.

Learn more about digital storytelling in Simirity.