The people behind
every story you will make.

My grandfather, Raoul Kraushaar, wrote music for Hollywood for forty years, from the Republic serials to Invaders from Mars, Abbott and Costello, Lassie, and more. Beyond him, I knew almost nothing. When I finally started digging, the tree kept going: on my mother’s side to a village in north-east Poland in the 1750s, and on my father’s fourteen generations back to sixteenth-century England, Germany and Switzerland. The records were all there. What I could not find was a way to see them, or to do anything with the faded photographs that came with them.

I am MyFamilyStory’s first user, and Raoul is my test case for everything we build. My tree is on the map, more than two thousand people in the places they lived, chapter by chapter: his runs from Paris to New York to Hollywood, with the sounds of each place behind it. Every new thing we make, I try on him first: restoring his photograph, putting him back in the world he saw, bringing his face to life, sitting down and talking with him. If it does not feel right with my own grandfather, it does not ship. That is what I hope every family gets from this: not a name on a record, but someone who looks back.

I’m the youngest of five children and have cherished memories of my grandparents. Sadly, some of them passed before I was old enough to form strong memories. One of the first Keepsakes I made with MyFamilyStory was a video of my grandfather, talking about his passion for nature. He was an avid outdoorsman who loved to hunt, fish, and canoe.

Watching the finished video brought back memories I hadn’t realized I still carried. This is the emotional connection with our past that I hope MyFamilyStory brings to millions of people.

First Keepsake: His grandfather, brought to life

My father, Lothar, was born in Königsberg, Germany, in 1927. He was drafted as a 14-year-old boy in the last months of the war and spent three years as a prisoner of war in Siberia. He eventually made his way to America, where he once again fought in a war, this time in Korea. My father had a hard life, but he had a soft spot for his dogs: more than once we came home to a wonderful smell from the kitchen, only to find Dad cooking, not for his six children, but for the dogs.

He passed away this year at the age of 98, and using an early version of MyFamilyStory, I brought my dad to life at his own funeral. The guests, and especially my siblings, were deeply moved as Dad spoke to us once again. At that time only our internal team had the technical skills to do that. Now any family can, with our Bring Your Ancestor to Life Keepsake.

First Keepsake: His father, Lothar, brought to life

My grandmother, Sandra, was a history professor at Western Washington University and a genealogist, and she is the reason I got excited about our family’s past. One of the first things I made with MyFamilyStory was her life story, using the Life Story Enricher to learn more about her career and the places she lived. I knew her as my grandmother. Reading her story, I got to know her as a person.

That is what matters to me about this work. It gives me a way to learn and discover what life looked like for my family before me, and the journey that brought them here.

First Keepsake: Sandra’s life story

I only knew my grandfather briefly, as a young child, so for most of my life he was a few family stories and one photograph: his portrait from Princeton’s Freshman Herald, a young man in a jacket and tie, printed in the grainy dots of a 1930s page.

That young man had quite a story. He grew up in Rahway, New Jersey, and arrived at Princeton in the depths of the Depression, where he found his place in the Triangle Club, the student theater troupe whose alumni include Jimmy Stewart and F. Scott Fitzgerald. As a junior he was elected its president, and that season his friend Brooks Bowman wrote “East of the Sun (and West of the Moon)” for the club’s show, a song that became an American standard. He was drawn to Hollywood and acting, but life took him another way: he served in the Army during World War II and built a career as a business executive.

When I brought his photo into MyFamilyStory, the grain fell away and there he was in color. Then I brought him to life. It felt like meeting him again, but at a younger stage of his life, when he was still the kid dreaming about the stage.

That’s what I want for every family: the chance to meet the people you came from, not just read about them.