Everything you need to write about Memory Murals.

TACOMA, Wash. — August 11, 2026 — Patrick Moore was nine months into building an app to save his parents' stories when he found out he was having a daughter.

The project stopped running in one direction.

Moore had not set out to start a company. He had set out to solve a problem in his own family, and the problem was volume.

His mother told him stories constantly. About her own life, but also about her parents, her brothers and sisters, relatives he had never met. Not one life history — dozens of them, spread across three generations, arriving in the middle of ordinary conversation.

He wanted to keep them. He had no practical way to catch them.

“She would tell me something I really wanted to remember,” Moore said, “and I couldn't find an easy way to capture it and keep it.”

The albums that don't say anything

The family's photo albums showed him the same problem from the other end.

There are a lot of them. A few have notes written on the pages. Most are blank.

The photographs survived perfectly well. What did not survive was everything around them — who these people are, what was happening that day, why anyone thought the moment was worth a picture.

“Most of them are blank,” Moore said. “There's no way for anyone to understand the context behind them.”

He looked for something that would fix both halves. He found genealogy platforms built around family trees, names and dates. He found social networks built around sharing publicly. He found journals and digital scrapbooks that still left the context to be filled in later, which is exactly what never happens.

So he built something himself.

Memory Murals is built around capturing a memory at the moment it is told rather than the moment someone finally sits down to organize it. A person can talk instead of writing, and the recording is transcribed, the people named aloud are matched to the family roster, and spoken time references are resolved to real dates. Voice is the primary path because it is the fastest way to catch a story while it is being told, not because writing is a problem.

Then it started running forward as well as back

The news that he was having a daughter changed what the project was for.

It had been an effort to preserve what his parents and grandparents remembered. Now it was also the thing that would let his daughter understand any of it — and, at the same time, a way to record her own childhood with the context attached from the beginning.

“It wasn't just my parents' and grandparents' history anymore,” Moore said. “Now I could save it for my daughter to understand. And I could capture her growing up the same way, and actually keep the context this time.”

The alternative was leaving her another shelf of albums nobody can explain.

“Could I have one for my mom?”

Memory Murals was originally intended for Moore's own family.

Then other people saw it.

They didn't just ask what he had built. They asked whether they could use it for their own mother, father or grandparent.

Millions of families have photographs of the people they love. They have names, birthdays and family trees.

What they often don't have is anything explaining them.

And many adult children carry the same unfinished intention: I really need to sit down and ask my parents about their lives.

“It doesn't feel urgent,” Moore said. “Right up until it does.”

Built for families, not followers

As more families began using the platform, Moore added features around the way families actually preserve memories.

Family members can privately share access. Parents and grandparents can respond to prompts when they don't know what story to tell next. Memories can include photographs, videos and audio alongside the stories behind them.

But one principle remained from the original version built for his own family: Memory Murals would not become another social network.

There is no public social feed and the experience isn't designed around likes, followers or keeping people scrolling.

The purpose is much quieter. It's to create a private collection of the voices, photographs, stories and ordinary moments that make up a family's history — with enough context attached that someone who wasn't there can still understand them.

The ordinary stories may eventually matter most

Technology has made it easier than ever to document life. Families take thousands of photographs and videos every year.

But Moore believes something important is still being lost.

A photograph captures what something looked like. It doesn't capture why the moment mattered, and it can't answer a question from someone who wasn't born yet.

That's the gap Memory Murals is trying to fill.

Not simply preserving more media, but preserving the human context surrounding it.

His advice to other families is simple.

Don't wait for the perfect interview or the perfect occasion.

Ask about the first job. The childhood bedroom. The neighborhood friends. The family vacations. The embarrassing stories. The ordinary Tuesday nobody thought was important enough to document.

“Ask while there's no reason to hurry,” Moore said. “That's the whole point.”