The My Life, My Story journal on a desk with family photographs

Books and Journals

Tools for keeping
a life story

Beautiful, practical books that help you record a life, organise family memories, and pass them on. Starting with our guided legacy journal.

View the journal Explore the guides

My Life, My Story

A guided legacy journal

My Life, My Story is a guided legacy journal that helps you record your life in your own words, to share with loved ones now and keep for the generations to come. It is thoughtfully structured around the stages of a life, with gentle prompts and generous space to write, reflect and remember.

There is no right or wrong way to use it. Write a little or a lot, dip in and out, or come back to a section as your story keeps unfolding. Curated by Carl Chinn MBE, it makes a meaningful keepsake to fill in for yourself or with a relative, and a thoughtful gift for anyone who wants to leave a lasting record.

View on Amazon

What is inside

Prompts that draw the story out

Guided prompts

Thoughtful questions that draw out memories of people, places, work, and the turning points that shaped a life.

Room for detail

Space for names, dates, places, and the stories behind the photographs, before that knowledge is lost.

Made for sharing

Fill it in alone, with a loved one, or use it to guide the recorded conversations that become part of the archive.

The collection

More titles are on the way

The My Life, My Story journal is the first in a growing collection of books and journals made to help families capture and keep their history.

New titles are in the works. Join the weekly letter and you will be the first to know when the next one arrives.

Get notified

By Carl Chinn

The books behind the archive

Before the podcast, there were the books. Carl has written more than thirty of them, on Birmingham, the Black Country, and the working-class lives that made both. His history of the city's real gangs became the story behind a hit television series.