Shared Journal for Families Living Apart: Connect With Stories

Andrew Ronald

Simirity Founder | Father of two

23rd September, 2025

A shared journal for families not only preserves stories, but also strengthens family bonds in a way traditional apps can’t. My family’s journey began when we realised that living apart was costing us more than just missed dinners and holiday celebrations. Video calls and messaging apps kept us updated, but never truly connected us. Something was missing—we desperately wanted to find out what.

In our search for better options, we discovered shared journals—digital platforms where many family members can add stories, memories and experiences in one private space. They seemed to be the perfect way to connect as we explored topics beyond our usual conversations, with the bonus of preserving family stories for future generations.

If your family’s spread out geographically, a shared journal is one of the best ways to regain that sense of closeness. In this article, we explore the challenges of living apart from family and how a shared journal can help.

3 Ways Living Apart Can Weaken Family Life

Most families focus on the obvious downsides of living apart—missed celebrations and fewer visits—but the real impact runs much deeper.

1. Feeling distant despite ‘staying connected’

Have you noticed how you can talk to family every week yet still feel like something is missing?

Our grandparents’ generation had no smartphones, video calls or instant messaging. Yet they understood each other better than we do today. Thanks to technology, we’ve perfected the art of ‘staying updated’, but trends show that family bonds are weakening over time. The ‘catch-up’ family call for example, covers everyone’s activities, the weather, and weekend plans, but it rarely connects family members in a more fulfilling way.

Perhaps that’s why, despite having more communication tools than any generation in history, a 2021 Harvard study found that 36% of Americans felt profound loneliness.

2. Brief family visits fail to create deep connections

Those rare family visits create precious memories, but they’re rarely enough to build the deep grandchild-grandparent relationships both generations benefit from.

Think about your child’s closest friendships—they’re built through regular interaction, shared stories, and mutual understanding that develops over time. The same applies to grandparent relationships. Children need to discover that Grandma was once a rebellious teenager who hitchhiked across Europe, or that Grandad with his walking stick was actually a passionate football player in his youth—to see them as intriguing individuals with backstories, not just relatives.

Brief holiday get-togethers rarely provide the relaxed atmosphere that children need to connect with their grandparents deeply. Everyone’s just too busy and there’s little one-on-one time.

3. Cherished family stories are disappearing

What feels unforgettable today becomes surprisingly fuzzy within just a few months.

I was convinced that I would never forget about the bath and bedtime routine with our boys, or the fantastic things they would say on the trips home from school, but these memories fade faster than expected. Meanwhile, my retired parents were alone in remembering the details of our ancestors, as well as interesting stories from their own lives and anecdotes about my childhood years. Surely it’s not sensible to rely solely on people’s memories rather than back them up in some other way?

Sadly, many families only realise this when the opportunity has passed. Be smart—create a shared journal to preserve these stories before it’s too late.

Capture your family’s history before it’s too late.

SIMIRITY JOURNAL

What Families Actually Need (Beyond Basic Communication)

Staying in touch with family members is easy these days—but building meaningful relationships requires more than quick updates and shared photos.

A safe space that encourages new and interesting family discussions

Families need gentle encouragement to share stories that actually matter.

The teenagers in your family can provide insights about friendship and school life that their younger cousins would really benefit from hearing. Your retired parents have a lifetime of experiences and learnings, many of which you’re yet to discover. Your partner has childhood memories that explain quirks you’ve wondered about for years. But these stories rarely emerge during rushed phone calls or busy family gatherings. Families need a dedicated space for the unhurried conversations that reveal personality, share wisdom, and build understanding across generations.

Shared family journal apps, complete with prompts for family stories, create the perfect environment for these revelations to unfold naturally.

Upgrading from simple photos and messages to real-life stories

Photos show what happened,

but stories reveal why it mattered.

You’ve probably taken thousands of family pictures—weekends away, school events, holiday moments that seemed significant at the time. But ten years later, can you remember what made each occasion special?

Photos capture faces and places beautifully, but they can’t preserve how excited your child was to be acting on stage in the school play, how challenging you all found Covid-19, or your own emotions about watching your children grow. It’s the back stories, emotional details and what it means to you, that can turn pretty photos into treasured memories.

But all too often, nobody captures these real-life stories in words, so they disappear forever. This is where digital storytelling is a great solution.

Essential Features For Shared Journal For Families

Not all shared journals are created equal—especially when it comes to family needs.

Traditional journaling apps with sharing features might work for couples or close friends, but families benefit from something more customised. Multi-generational users, varying privacy needs, and the goal of creating lasting story archives demand specific features that most platforms simply don’t offer.

Shared journal features to look out for:

• Complete privacy — your family stories remain yours alone, with no advertising, data mining, or corporate access to your most precious memories.
• Story-by-story control — tailor each story’s visibility to match its content, from private parent-child conversations to whole-family celebrations.
• Family-focused prompts — hundreds of thoughtful prompts that inspire stories worth sharing, from childhood adventures to life-changing moments.
• Complete family portraits — individual profiles that capture each person’s unique story collection, making it easy to explore any family member’s experiences.
• Memory resurface features — story anniversaries naturally bring beloved family memories back into daily conversations without any effort from you.
• Family admin features — help less confident family members participate fully through co-authoring options and administrative support for their accounts.
• Inheritance-ready archives — stories organised for long-term preservation and easy transfer to future family members, creating a lasting family legacy for those not yet born.

When a shared journal combines all these features, stories strengthen family bonds and preserve family heritage in a way that touches the lives of future generations.

Your family’s past, present & future—woven together in Simirity.

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Our Family’s Shared Journal: Why We Built Simirity

Everything changed for me in 2019. Both my parents had serious and unexpected heath issues, and it finally dawned on me that our time together isn’t limitless.

Suddenly, our biannual visits and weekly catch-up calls felt painfully inadequate! We wanted to feel closer despite the challenge of living in different countries. And to add to the complexity, I desperately wanted to preserve the family stories that only they knew about, before the stories were lost forever. We’d spent years exchanging pleasant updates about the weather and what happened at the weekend, but we’d rarely talked about their past, their parents, and our family’s history in general.

We wanted to discover who our parents really were before they became our parents—and ensure our children could know them the same way.

A shared journal seemed like the obvious solution. We could explore interesting parts of our family’s past using family journal prompts, while building a lasting family archive. But existing platforms disappointed us. Apps like Day One and Journey work beautifully for personal reflection, but they were more optimised for individual journalling than family storytelling. At that time, they didn’t have a shared journal option, but even now that it’s been added, it’s more like an extra feature than a core functionality.

So we decided to build our own solution, Simirity, a family journal app designed specifically for multi-generational storytelling, with every feature focused on bringing families closer together. This is our story.

The results have transformed our relationships in ways we never anticipated. Today, we have hundreds of preserved stories spanning four generations—from my grandparents’ wartime experiences to my children’s current adventures. We’ve captured not just what happened in our family’s past, but why it mattered and what we’ve learned along the way.

Most importantly, we’ve never felt closer even though we live thousands of miles apart. Our conversations have broadened to explore interesting new topics—childhood aspirations, interesting career moments, tough moments in life that shaped them, and so many more. What started as an urgent need to preserve their stories has become an ongoing family journey of discovery, learning and surprises.

We wish every family could have conversations like these, and preserve them for future enjoyment. I can’t imagine anything more precious. To get a taste of how it could be, explore our demo Simirity account and imagine what stories your family would tell.

Take a peek inside Simirity’s demo account and imagine how sharing your own stories could bring your family even closer.

FAQs About Shared Journals

What’s the difference between a shared journal and a family group chat?
Group chats have a more practical focus, sharing brief updates and exchanging information. Shared journals serve a different purpose—there are about capturing the stories that you and your family will want to look back on, and an organised archive that can be passed on to future family.

The group chats in my family are messy feeds, filled with random photos, questions, updates on latest happenings. In fact, it’s a pain if you want to go back in time and find something that was shared. By contrast, shared journals feel like a well organised library, with complete stories to enjoy not snippets of conversations.

Is it safe to put personal family stories online?
Most shared journals offer complete privacy with no advertising or data mining. Your stories should be encrypted and accessible only to family members you invite – never to strangers or companies.

What if my family stops using the shared journal after a few weeks?
Unlike individual journaling, where people feel a responsibility to write every day, shared family journal entries happen less often. In my family, for example, I write only one journal entry most weeks. It does get busier over the summer holidays though…

The point is, it’s up to you—don’t feel you have to maintain a certain frequency of stories to make it worthwhile. Treat each journal entry as a success! Even sharing one story a month can go a long way towards achieving something your family will love. And over time, as stories slowly mount up, there’s an increasing likelihood that others will join in.

Can children contribute to family shared journals?
Absolutely—our children certainly do, with our help. As a parent, you can create profiles for your children and even write journal entries on their behalf. You have their login details, and when they reach 13 years old, you can share the details with them if you wish. Then they can create their own stories.

In our family, we mostly encourage them to share their thoughts and views in our stories, usually using the audio recording functionality. Capturing your children talking in audio recordings is definitely something I would encourage all parents to do—it’s priceless hearing how they used to sound.

Turn everyday moments into lifelong memories in Simirity.

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