Counted honestly, however small.
These figures are read live from the service, right now, every time this page loads. We are a young service; the numbers are young too. We publish them anyway, because a supporter, a partner, or a family deserves the real ones — and because every single count below is a thing some family now keeps that would otherwise have faded.
Privacy note: these are whole-service totals and nothing else. No names, no content, no per-family figures — the archives being counted stay as private as their families made them.
Lives being kept — living, remembered, and everything between.
Stories, recipes, quotes, lessons, ordinary days.
Recordings of people saying the family names.
Rescued from shoeboxes, captioned while someone still remembers.
Written to someone, or for them to find later.
Family members and invited contributors adding what they carry.
Beyond the counts
Alongside the archive itself, DearestEllie publishes 9 free guides and 12 printable kits — interviewing a parent, recording a voice, rescuing the shoebox, running a community life-stories workshop — free to every family and organization, no account required. They are used by families we will never meet, which is exactly the point.
As our named programs grow, per-program counts (families served through hospice partners, workshops run, children whose families built an archive) will be published here in the same spirit: real, verifiable, and never inflated.
Stories of impact
The numbers above are the countable part. The uncountable part is a granddaughter hearing a voice she was too young to remember, or a family laughing at the story everyone groans about — and those stories belong to the families, not to us. We publish family stories here only with explicit written permission, and none are published yet. When they are, they will be real ones.