Kit
Heritage Archive: Black Family Stories Pack
Culturally Specific Printable Insert Pages
Your family kept records when the system didn't. Write it down here.
Black families who want to document their history using guides that account for the specific contexts, gaps, and strengths of the Black American experience — the Great Migration, enslavement and its documentation barriers, oral tradition as primary archive, the church as cultural center, and the particular resilience embedded in family stories that were preserved despite every force against preservation.
The Name It First Experience
Black family history in America was systematically underdocumented. Enslaved ancestors have no government records. Migration routes were survived, not filed. Church ledgers replaced civil registries. Oral tradition carried what paper could not. This pack provides culturally specific insert pages for the Heritage Archive Kit — interview prompts, documentation frameworks, and record-tracing guides built around the specific historical and cultural contexts of Black American families. Grounded in genealogical research standards from the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society and oral history methodology from scholars of the African American experience, this is a tool for preserving the stories your family carried through everything. The output is your Heritage Archive: Black Family Stories Pack Agreement — a structured archive of what your family remembers, where it came from, and how it survived.
You can opt into 30-, 60-, and 90-day check-ins from your account. We recommend you do — the point is to see what changed.
Sample questions
- I want to start with a memory. Tell me about a place where your family gathered — a kitchen, a church, a porch, a yard. What did that place smell like, feel like, sound like?
- Tell me about the person in your family whose story you most want to preserve. What would be lost if it wasn't written down?
- What is the first memory that comes when you think about your family's Black history in America — and why that one?
- What story has been passed down in your family that you want to make absolutely sure survives — the one that explains something important about who your people are?
- What do you most want the next generation to know about what your family has survived and built?
Research basis
Grounded in Thompson (2000) The Voice of the Past on oral history methodology / Alex Haley genealogy scholarship applied to Black American family documentation / Gates (2009) Faces of America on African American ancestry and the specific documentation barriers created by enslavement.
Choose your format.
Every format asks the same questions and produces the same document.
Print Paperbackpersonalize
A real book and a pen. Write in the margins. The most permanent version of you on a page.
$29.99
eBook + journal
The full guide on any screen, with a companion journal to write your answers by hand.
Not available
Audiobook
We read every question and every scenario aloud. For the commute, the walk, the dishes.
Not available
Hardcoverpersonalize
The keepsake edition — sewn, ribboned, made to sit on a shelf and be returned to.
Not available
Digital Fill + membership+membership
Answer on screen. Your responses save as you go and assemble into your finished document.
$14.99
Hands-Free Interactive + membership+membership
Listen to each question and speak your answer. We capture it. You never touch a keyboard.
Not available
Everything packages
The Paperback Everything Package
[personalize]
Not available
The Hardcover Everything Package
[personalize]
Not available
The Premium Hardcover Everything Package
[personalize]
Not available
Already own this title? Add any other format from your account.
Choose your pace.
The Essential path takes you to your finished document by the questions that matter most. The Full-depth path walks every question, every scenario, every angle. Both produce the same signed document — one just goes deeper on the way there.
Essential path
Shorter sessions. The questions that go directly to the document.
Full depth
Every question. Every scenario, every angle.
Already own this title? Add any other format from your account.
Buy it for yourself.
Choose your format above.