Why I built Family Stork, a note from our founder

I built Family Stork for my own family first. It seems only fair to tell you why.

The questions my own body asks me

I have arthritis. If you live with anything chronic, you know the questions that come with it, because they never stop. Is it my diet? Is there a supplement that actually helps my pain, or helps me perform better, or am I imagining the difference? Was this week's flare about the weather, the food, the sleep, or nothing at all?

Here is the part that got under my skin: the answers exist. They exist in my own days. What I ate, what I took, how I moved, how I felt. If someone kept that story in one place, the patterns would be sitting right there in plain sight. But no appointment is long enough to reconstruct two years of days from memory, and no portal was ever built to hold them. So I built the place where my own story could start answering my own questions.

What my parents' story should have told me

Both of my parents died from lung disease. My mom fairly young.

When a doctor asks me about family history, that answer matters for the rest of my life. And it matters even more for my kids. Should they know? Of course they should. Not as a scary fact to carry around, but as a plain one: written down in their story, where every doctor who ever treats them can see it in one line, without anyone having to remember it correctly in a waiting room forty years from now.

I can share my record with my children's Family Stork accounts today. Their family history writes itself and stays current as my story unfolds. What I know about my body might one day help theirs. That is not a feature to me. That is the point.

We are not blaming doctors

Let me be clear about something. Doctors are not the problem, and Family Stork is not built out of frustration with them. It is built out of frustration with what they are handed.

A doctor gets minutes with you, plus whatever a test can say that day. Tests show the moment. They do not show the story: the flares and the calm stretches, the medicines started and stopped, what helped and what did nothing, what your parents' charts would have said. When something gets missed, it is almost never carelessness. It is that nobody gave them the complete picture, summarized simply enough to read before the visit.

There are too many unknowns in health. The full story, told simply, is how a family removes some of them. That summary is exactly what Family Stork writes.

The handoff is the whole reason

One day my kids will each hold their own story: everything from their childhood, everything I logged for them, and everything my story adds to theirs. It will be theirs, really theirs, transferred to them on purpose.

Few things you can build for your children last their whole life. This one is designed to. That is why the stork carries a heartbeat in our logo: the story starts before they can hold anything, and it is waiting for them when they can.

If any of this sounds like your family too, it starts with a name: familystork.com.

Rob, founder