Interactive talks and workshops tailored for families, communities, and professionals.
Each session is a journey into storytelling, genealogy, and digital preservation—helping you unlock the stories behind every name and timeline. From tracing ancestral roots to crafting interactive timelines, our sessions blend knowledge and creativity to help you connect with your past and preserve it for future generations.
1. “Turning Scattered Memories into a Legacy: A Beginner’s Guide”
For total beginners. Teaches attendees how to start from scratch, even with disorganized camera rolls or dusty boxes, and create a meaningful archive. Emphasizes that you don’t need to wait until media is scanned or even available—Archoral allows you to begin with facts, timelines, relationships, and storytelling first. Media can then be added later, making this a practical path even if items are lost to time.
2. “Archiving Without Media: Building Legacy Through Stories Alone”
Shows how to create a legacy archive even when no photos or documents are available. Focuses on capturing family stories, facts, and relationships through timelines, voice recordings, and written reflections. Demonstrates how Archoral supports preserving history when traditional media is missing, ensuring memories and lessons are not lost and creating a foundation that can be expanded with media if it becomes available later.
3. “Living Legacies: Preserving Life Through Story and Sound”
A mindset-shifting talk that shows audiences archiving isn’t just for after loss—it can be a vibrant, ongoing part of life. Explores how to proactively preserve the stories we are living right now, blending written, visual, and especially audio memories. Demonstrates the power of recording voice memories, and offers both technical how‑tos and emotional tips for storytelling through sound. Highlights how combining everyday reflections, conversations, and multimedia creates a living archive that both preserves the present and leaves a lasting legacy for future generations.
1. “Listening to Life: Capturing Stories With Our Elders”
Takes a warm, nostalgic approach to spending time with older family members, encouraging families to sit together, share memories, and enjoy stories that might otherwise be forgotten. Explores how to spark meaningful conversations, gently prompt recollections, and record those treasured moments for preservation. Emphasizes the joy of learning about a relative’s life and building connections across generations, while also noting the added benefit of how this reflective storytelling supports memory health and emotional well‑being.
2. “Preserving the Person: Family Archives as Companions in Dementia Journeys”
Blends the strengths of digital memory diaries, story preservation for dementia caregivers, and hands-on archiving strategies. Explores how families and caregivers can use Archoral to create evolving memory logs that support legacy building, therapeutic engagement, and emotional connection. Demonstrates how to retain the narrative identity of loved ones even as speech or memory fade, while also offering a practical toolkit to blend photos, audio, and stories into a meaningful family archive that benefits both caregivers and care recipients.
1. “Preparing Your Family Archive for the Genealogist”
Designed for families or photo managers who want to make their collections genealogy-ready. Rather than leaving media in static file folders after scanning, this session shows how Archoral makes it possible to go beyond folders and organize by facts, events, and timelines. This approach transforms scattered media into structured, research-ready archives that a genealogist can immediately build upon. Covers practical steps for tagging people, places, and dates, and demonstrates how to weave photos, documents, and media into a cohesive narrative that supports genealogical research. (~50 min)
2. “Preparing Genealogical Archives for Family Expansion”
Created for genealogists who want their work to integrate seamlessly with family archives. Explains how to hand off research in a way that invites families or photo managers to add photos, letters, audio stories, and other personal materials—making the combined archive richer and more engaging. (~50 min)
3. “The Business of Memory: How to Offer Archival Services to Families”
(This workshop can be a 1-hour overview or a 2-hour deep dive)
A workshop designed for professional organizers, photo managers, and genealogists who want to expand and professionalize their services. This session shows how to move beyond simple photo organization into building full family archives that are valuable for both storytelling and research. Participants will learn:
The session emphasizes delivering upgraded, interactive archives that not only preserve family history but can also support memory care activities, provide new service offerings, and generate ongoing client relationships.
1. “Life As They See It: A Family Activity in Memory Making”
Combines the importance of involving children directly in archiving with capturing everyday commentary and small daily memories. Families are encouraged to have children upload items, record audio stories, or reflect on lessons learned. This builds self‑awareness, highlights accomplishments, and fosters personal reflection while also ensuring that fleeting moments—those ordinary comments and experiences that analog albums often missed—are preserved. Demonstrates how these practices create positive reminders and self‑esteem boosts for children both now and later in life. (~50 min)
2. “From Report Cards to Camera Rolls: Preserving School Stories in the Digital Age”
Combines the importance of capturing traditional milestones like report cards, artwork, and recess memories with retrieving scattered digital fragments from emails, texts, social media, and phone camera rolls. Guides families on bringing all of these pieces together into a cohesive life story, ensuring nothing is lost to the fast pace of digital life. (~50 min)
3. “Ethical Wills & Legacy Letters: Leaving Behind What Matters Most”
Introduces the concept of ethical wills and legacy letters—documentation that passes down values, lessons, and hopes rather than financial assets. Explains how Archoral can help families capture these legacies through multimedia, ensuring future generations inherit not just memories but guiding principles. Focuses on video records and voice memories. Covers technical how-tos and emotional tips for storytelling through sound.
1. “Memory Tools for Identity, Change & Belonging”
Blends the strengths of identity-focused archiving sessions into one inclusive talk. Addresses adoption, foster care, DNA surprises, gender or family transitions, and other significant life changes. Explains how to preserve the “before and after” of identity discovery using visual storytelling, narrative timelines, and family history reconstruction. Incorporates the concept of DCF’s Lifebooks for foster children, showing how every change of environment and family configuration can be meaningfully recorded. Highlights how Archoral accepts and organizes the full spectrum of stories, and how thorough indexing and connectivity can even help solve genealogical brick wall challenges.
2. “Preserving Chosen Family: LGBTQ Memory Archives”
Designed for LGBTQ audiences who often build familial connections outside of biological lineage. Offers a thoughtful strategy for documenting those networks and giving them permanence and honor. Highlights how Archoral represents with gender flags, allows recognition of same‑sex unions, and incorporates adoption, foster, donor, and surrogate angles. Emphasizes that it’s not just about community networks but also about preserving the people closest to you as they are. Demonstrates how Archoral provides tools to organize, emphasize, and preserve this wide range of stories with accuracy and respect.
1. “From Attics to Archives: Enriching Community History Together”
Brings together the ideas of community digitization, museum practices, and library partnerships into one unified program. Designed for SLAM (Society, Library, Archive, and Museum) audiences as well as community organizations, this session shows how to connect institutional preservation with personal archiving. Focuses on creating community outreach programs where SLAMs help the public digitize their paper, photos, and oral stories into searchable digital collections, while the public enriches SLAM archives by contributing context, family histories, and personal media. Demonstrates how Archoral provides the tools to merge these two streams so that institutional collections and personal archives coexist and grow together—building richer, more inclusive community history.
2. “From Attics to Archives: Implementation Workshop for SLAMs”
(This workshop can be a 1-hour overview or a 2-hour deep dive)
An interactive workshop designed for SLAM (Society, Library, Archive, and Museum) professionals who want to put community archiving strategies into practice. This session focuses on working directly with community clubs, schools, and local organizations to facilitate digitization and story‑sharing events. Emphasizes implementation strategies, including how to manage contributions that arrive in random order or mixed formats. Demonstrates how Archoral automatically organizes, connects, and curates these contributions into cohesive archives—ensuring that both institutional collections and community‑sourced content grow together in a structured, meaningful way.
Kate Forry Guanci is a former film industry professional turned entrepreneur, caregiver, and innovator. With over 25 years as a Prop Master and Production Designer in commercials, feature films, television, and military training programs, she built a reputation for precision, creativity, and problem-solving. Today, she brings that same expertise to Archoral.com, a platform she founded to transform how families and communities preserve their histories.
Her work is deeply informed by her role as full-time caregiver to her husband, Charlie, who is living with Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD). Kate speaks candidly on resilience, identity, and the invisible weight of caregiving, blending personal experience with systemic advocacy. She is deeply community-oriented, with a strong belief in teamwork and collaboration, and is driven by a passion for uncovering the details that define who people are—documenting those stories for both personal representation and historical preservation. As both an amateur genealogist and cultural archivist, she bridges creativity, caregiving, and history—offering audiences not just abstract ideas, but practical insights born from lived experience and decades of professional discipline.
