Every family deserves its own KINKORA.

On my father's side of the family there is a book called KINKORA. It was begun in the 1780s, and every generation since has added to it: handwritten notes, clippings, a family tree across its pages, and the voyage out of Kilkenny in 1848. Almost nobody has anything like it.

And none of it is digital. It is one copy, in one house. Nobody far away can add to it, nobody can hear a single voice in it, and if it were lost in a fire, a flood or a move, nearly 250 years would go with it. The idea is priceless. The format is fragile.

Not long ago I watched my father start a notebook he had bought at an airport, addressed to his granddaughters. It was one of the most beautiful things I had seen in a long time, and it frightened me a little, because it is one book, written once, by hand. It holds the ink, not the voice.

I grew up between a Swiss mother and an Australian father, two countries and two ways of remembering. My father's side had KINKORA; my parents kept us in eighteen years of photograph albums, every picture printed and captioned by hand. It taught me early that where you come from doesn't keep itself. You have to hold onto it deliberately.

My working life has been in finance, and working around wealth taught me something uncomfortable. Enormous care goes into preserving the money, and almost none into preserving what made a family a family in the first place. The structures for one are centuries old. For the other there is a shoebox and good intentions.

I built Cerne so that every family can have its own KINKORA: kept a little at a time, by everyone in it, in their own voices, and handed on. Whether you are afraid of losing someone, or someone is already gone, it is worth starting while there is still someone to ask.