A child is born
You could buy a bedtime book about anyone. With Cerne you read them a true one: how their parents met, where their grandfather grew up.
Cerne
A living record of your family — built slowly, ring by ring.
So much of what makes a family never gets written down — the voices, the ordinary afternoons, the reasons behind the big decisions.
Cerne is a quiet place to keep them — while they are still here to be kept.
Why families come
Every family reaches for its story at one of three moments.
A parent starts to slow down
The questions you always meant to ask get harder to ask. Cerne asks them gently, while there is still time.
Someone is gone
Your children ask about them, and there is no answer, no photograph, nothing they wrote. Cerne gathers what remains, the letters, the voice messages and what everyone remembers, and keeps it with them for the generations after.
Some families come because they are afraid of losing someone. Some come because someone is already gone. Some simply want to live this part of their lives on purpose. All of them start the same record.
Why Cerne exists
Every family is a dynasty. Almost none are written down.
A few families grow up remembering themselves — keeping the books and the albums, knowing where they came from. Most don't. They carry their whole history in one or two people, and those people don't stay forever.
Often it comes down to a single book, written once. Beautiful — but a book holds the ink, not the voice. The next generation is left with the words, and not the person who spoke them.
We started Cerne to change that: to make keeping a family's living record something you do a little at a time, on purpose, whether you are afraid of losing someone or someone is already gone. A family's dynasty has nothing to do with money, and everything to do with what gets kept.
Nobody owns a family's record. Each generation keeps it, adds its ring, and hands it on.
What gets lost
It isn't that we forget. It's that we mean to, later.
Nobody plans to lose the stories. We all mean to write them down, to record grandma before it's too late, to note the small things the children do. But "later" is a quiet thief. The afternoons pass, the details soften, and the one person who remembers doesn't get asked in time.
The last generation left us boxes of photographs with no names on the back. We are leaving our children thousands a year, with no story behind any of them. The photograph survives. The story behind it does not.
The problem was never care — every family cares. It's that keeping a family's record has always been slow, effortful work that competes with everything else. So it waits. And waiting is how it's lost.
How it works
Three calm steps, then a lifetime.
01
Map the core
Start with the people closest to you: names, dates and places, typed so they are exact. Then a short set of questions about who they are, answered however suits you, by voice, in writing or with a photograph. Once your household has answered them, the heart of your Cerne is in place.
02
Tend it, ring by ring
From there, the whole family feeds it, as actively or as quietly as they like: a voice note from a grandmother, a photograph from a cousin, an answer when a gentle question arrives (we call it the Asking). Nothing is ever invented; the record only holds what your family gives it.
03
Draw the sap
From the very first occasion, Cerne draws things from the record: a bedtime story, a card, a year in one volume, a voice to play back. Digital from day one, printed when you want to hold it. Each one leaves the record richer for the next.
Inside the record
A living thing, not a folder.
Cerne isn't a place to dump files. It's a record you can walk through.
The family, mapped
An interactive tree of the people and the ties between them, and a map of where your family came from and how it moved.
Real voices, kept
Voice notes and stories in the teller's own words — recorded, transcribed, and always attributed to the person who gave them.
The Asking
Gentle questions that arrive now and then, answerable in a minute by voice or in writing. Never a streak, never a nudge you'll resent.
Many hands, one record
All it takes is a Cerne at the heart of the family.
Heartwood is the core a tree grows from. Everyone tends it, ring by ring, in the way that suits them.
Answers a gentle question out loud, in her own words. What she says is written out for her, and her voice is kept.
Adds what they lived through: the year's photographs, and the story of why each one mattered.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Asked at six, again at twelve, again at eighteen.
Names the faces in an old photograph from wherever they live.
One gentle question, one person, one minute. No streaks, no nagging.
Made to be held
The ink holds the words. The voice holds the person.
A keepsake can be held in the hands, and heard in the teller's own voice.
Walter · reading to his granddaughter Nora
“Long before you — before your father was even a small boy — high in the green mountains of Appenzell, there was a farm.”
0:006:17
Pace
His own voice, reading all sixteen pages of The Bells of Appenzell. Nothing synthetic, nothing added.
The Bells of Appenzell
The book's sixteen pages, as Walter reads them.
1 · High in the green mountains
Long before you — before your father was even a small boy — high in the green mountains of Appenzell, there was a farm. The hills there are so steep the cows graze them sideways, and from almost everywhere you can see the white peak of the Säntis. That was where your grandfather Walter was born, and his father before him.
2 · When the cows come down
Every autumn, when the high pastures turn gold, the cows of Appenzell walk down the mountain in a long, slow line — flowers set upon their heads, their bells sounding all the way down the valley. It is one of the oldest things in that place, and one of the most beautiful. Your grandfather grew up to the sound of those bells.
3 · Every cow had a name
Every cow on that mountain had a name and a bell of her own, and your grandfather knew each one by the sound she made — which was Bella, which was Resli, which was Fee, who always came last because she came when she was ready and not before. And all of this is true, little one.
4 · A boy who listened
Walter grew up on those slopes — mending the stone walls, following the herd, learning the weather the way you learn a face. To him the mountain was never quiet. It was always saying something, if you knew how to listen. He learned, young, that it was wise to listen.
5 · The warm house below
At the bottom of the field stood a little farmhouse with a stove that never went out, and that was your grandmother Ruth's kitchen. There was always bread rising and Birnbrot warming, and a light in the window after dark — so that whoever was up on the mountain could always find the way home.
6 · The winter your father was small
One winter — when your father, Jonas, was only ten years old, a little boy still — a storm came down off the Säntis after dark. The wind blew so hard you could not see the barn from the kitchen window. Everyone was inside, warm, the fire going, the snow piling against the door.
7 · Then the bells began
And then, out in the dark, the cows began to ring. Not their ordinary evening sound — all their bells at once, hard and wild, the way they never do at night. Your grandfather stood at the window a long while, telling himself it was only the wind. But a cow does not ring like that for weather. Something was wrong on the mountain.
8 · Out into the storm
So he put on everything he owned and went out into the snow. And your father — only ten — would not be left behind, and went with him, holding tight to the back of his coat. Your grandmother Ruth stood at the window with her hands pressed together, and watched their one small lantern until it disappeared into the white.
9 · Where the cows were looking
Up in the field, the whole herd stood turned the same way, toward the top of the mountain, calling and calling into the dark. So that was the way they climbed — following where the cows were looking — up through the snow, the better part of an hour, the lantern swinging in the wind.
10 · The girl by the wall
And there, at the very top, against the old stone wall, they found her. A young woman named Elizabeth, from England, far from home — she had climbed the ridge in the afternoon sun and been caught when the storm turned. She was too cold to stand. Your father took the scarf from his own neck and gave it to her, without being asked.
11 · Down the mountain, together
They brought her down between them, one slow step at a time, the cows still calling behind them, the lantern swinging ahead — all the long way down to the little house where the window burned gold with firelight, waiting.
12 · Warm by the fire
Ruth already had the fire built high and dry clothes warming beside it. She sat Elizabeth down in front of the flames and gave her a thick slice of warm Birnbrot before the poor girl had even got her boots off — for that was Ruth's answer to everything, and it is a good one.
13 · Half the night, listening
And they sat up together, half the night, listening to Elizabeth's story — where she was from, how she had come to be on their mountain — while the storm blew itself out beyond the window. By morning it was gone, as if it had never come at all.
14 · How he knew
Your grandfather thought about that night for the rest of his life. People would ask him how he knew to go out into such a storm. 'I didn't,' he always said. 'The cows knew. I only listened.'
15 · Years and years later
Years and years later, when the mountain was old and so was he, your grandfather walked you — little Nora — up that very same green hillside, your small hand in his. And he taught you the cows by name, one by one, exactly as he had always known them: Bella, Resli, and Fee, who comes when she is ready.
16 · Where he first told you
And it was there, on that hillside, in the very place it happened, that he first told you this story. It is a true one. Every word of it happened, up on that mountain, on a night the bells would not stop. And it is all still here — kept and waiting — for whenever you would like it read again. Goodnight, little one. Sleep now.
The keepsakes
Examples of what the record can become.
Some families come for a keepsake: a bedtime book, a card, a birthday. The core they build to make it means the next one is already half-made. These are examples, not a fixed menu, and nothing in them is ever invented.
What the record is asked for
The Improbability of Us
Drawn from the moments already kept about how two lives came near each other — the moves, the near-misses, the people in between.
- Where were you living the year before you met?
- Who introduced you, and how did they know you both?
- What almost kept you apart that year?
- What do you remember of the first hour?
Nothing here is invented. Each passage is drawn from moments already kept.
Where this is going
We're at the beginning of the record.
Today, Cerne holds a living record the whole family can tend together, and draws keepsakes from it. Next come stories understood across languages, and keepsakes you can hold in your hands: printed books, and voices for the youngest to grow up with.
We're building it slowly, on purpose. Ring by ring.
- Q3 2026
A first circle of families tests Cerne
- Q1 2027
The full Cerne is built
- Q2 2027
The first 200 founding families begin
Questions
The things people ask.
What is Cerne, exactly?
A living record of your family — the people, the stories, the voices and the moments that make you who you are. You tend it a little at a time, and it grows, ring by ring. From it, Cerne draws keepsakes to hold and to pass on.
Do I need to be organised or technical?
Not at all. It's as simple as leaving a voice note, adding a photograph, or answering a gentle question out loud. Grandparents can simply speak; their words are written out for them.
Is our family's record private?
Yes. Your record is private by default and kept in trust for your family alone — on a system built and tested to stay standing, and never sold, mined, or used to train anything.
Does Cerne ever make things up?
Never. Cerne only ever finds, arranges and shows what your family has genuinely given it. It doesn't invent moments, people, or details. The record is only ever true.
What if the person we want to remember is already gone?
Cerne can still keep them. Gather what remains, the letters, photographs and voice messages, and what everyone who knew them remembers. The record holds it with them, each memory attributed to whoever told it, and nothing is invented to fill the gaps.
Isn't this a memory book service, like StoryWorth or Remento?
They do one thing and do it well: a question a week to one person, for a year, printed as a book at the end. Cerne is a different shape. It's built around a whole family rather than one storyteller, and it doesn't finish — a book is one of the things drawn from the record, not the point of it. And when the person answering the questions is gone, a book like that is closed. A record isn't.
Isn't this a genealogy service, like MyHeritage or Ancestry?
They're for finding ancestors you never met — searching archives and records for names, dates and places, sometimes back centuries. Cerne holds what no archive has: the people your family still remembers, in their own voices. A tree can tell you your great-grandmother's name. It can't tell you what she always said when someone left the house. The two sit well together — genealogy picks up where living memory runs out, and Cerne keeps the part that's still here.
Who can add to or see our record?
You do. Cerne is made for families to keep together, so you choose who to bring in — and what each person can see or add.
What can I make with it?
Keepsakes drawn from your record — a bound book, cards, a chapter for a child. Each one holds the record as it stood the day you made it, and the record keeps growing after. The ones on this page are examples, not a fixed menu; there will be more over time.
When can we start?
Cerne opens to its first 200 founding families in Q2 2027. Join the waitlist and we'll be in touch when there's a place for you.
How much does it cost?
The first 200 households join at a founding rate of CHF 50 a year, held for life. Everyone your household brings into the record, grandparents, siblings and children, joins free. Keepsakes are priced separately.
Join the waitlist
Be one of the first 200 founding families.
Founding families begin in Q2 2027, at a founding rate of CHF 50 a year per household, held for life. Leave your name and we'll be in touch when there's a place for you.
Just your name and email, used only to contact you about Cerne. Never shared, never sold.
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