Featured Digital Legacy Projects
For thirty-five years, I’ve been helping people create generational family connection.
See What My Clients Have Created
Joyce
Joyce loves "food, family, and flowers, but not necessarily in that order."
Joyce made a career out of creating beautiful food and running a small catering business for nearly forty years. She wanted to document some of her favorite recipes in a series of cookbooks, and with an online blog so that her recipes are available to all. I then helped Joyce record videos demonstrating the processes for making her signature “Caramel Pecan Nut Rolls.” We also set up a class so she could teach this skill to others. Her recipes, voice, expertise, and personality are now preserved for generations to come.
Another part of Joyce’s legacy is the Mont and Amelia Johnson Legacy Garden. Joyce’s vision has been to turn her heritage home (originally built by her husband’s great-grandfather in 1901) into a community meditation garden. She personally designed, landscaped, and maintains the Legacy Garden, and welcomes visitors daily. In addition, she has catered wedding receptions on the property for years.
Nedra & Donrey
Nedra maintains that gardening in the high mountains is fundamentally different than gardening at lower climates.
With more than 90 years of combined gardening expertise, Nedra and Donrey Secrist have spent decades perfecting the art of growing flowers in the high mountain altitudes of Utah and Idaho. High mountain gardens need drought-tolerant, cold-tolerant, wildlife-resistant plants, and the high-alkaline soils present challenges as well. Their legacy has been to pass on their expertise in order to help other gardeners succeed in this challenging growing environment. They specialize in perennial flower gardening. Nedra has published two perennial gardening books and continues to maintain a gardening blog, powerfulperennials.com
Another part of Nedra & Donny’s legacy was to record and edit the story of their courtship, engagement, and marriage. Their romance and relationship is now preserved for children, grandchildren, and other family members.
Jim
Jim worried about who would maintain the work he had preserved after his death.
Jim inherited several file cabinets full of documents pertaining to the life of his 2nd great grandfather, Edwin Whiting, and spent many years as a member of the Edwin Whiting Family Organization to help document the life of this pioneer ancestor who trekked west with a handcart company in 1850. Jim fundraised for and built the Edwin Whiting Online Archives www.edwinwhiting.org, but he worried about who would maintain the work he had preserved after his death.
His legacy has been to create and self-publish histories of several of his ancestors, so our work involved helping him digitize his publications and store them where they could be accessed by future generations.
Jim compiled self-published histories of each of his grandfathers and two of his his great-grandfathers.
Roland
Roland wanted to share his love for his wife and document their love for life together.
After his wife died of Lupus, Roland wondered how best to preserve a history of their lives together to share with his descendants. I interviewed him for a series of videos. He shared the stories of his childhood, his career, and beyond. These were transcribed and he added photographs to make a book about his life.
Segments of his videos were excerpted into a short “Legacy Story” video so that his voice could be preserved for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Bart & Shanna
When you build a home from the ground up and then raise twelve children in it, it takes on a special kind of heritage.
Bart’s training as a physicist led to an interest in passive solar homes, and he and his family members spent many years painstakingly building a home that could be heated by the warmth of the sun. When they decided to downsize and sell the home, they wanted to preserve the story of this unique home, including what the interior looked like, so that their children would always have a memory to look back on. They created a small 30-page coffee table book which includes photos of every room in the house, along with commentary about some of the favorite family traditions they enjoyed as the children were growing up. Then, they gifted a copy to each of their children and grandchildren.
