Nassau Woman Creates Video 'Legacy' Site For Families To Remember

ROCKVILLE CENTRE, NY — A woman from Rockville Centre has created a business that brings families together now and for the future.

Victoria Turk launched the website: storiesofalifetime.com as a way to learn intimate details about relatives, and preserve those memories.

Turk said the COVID-19 lockdown was when the thought was triggered.

"I was separated from my family and from my parents," Turk told Patch.

With her parents dealing with health scares at the same time, she, along with so many others, began to ponder mortality.

"When my kids get to grow up, they're not going to know who my parents are," she thought.

Fortunately, Turk's parents are doing better now. But, Turk realized that her children didn't know their grandparents as people or any of the memories from generations of lives lived.

Turk thought about how much she actually knew about her parents. Using Google, she found hundreds of questions to ask parents before they die.

"I know it sounds really morbid, but that's the truth," she said.

That was the impetus for her idea. Turk's father would be the trial subject, answering the first batch of questions on video.

"I wanted to see their faces, hear their laugh and watch them cry," she said.

But the files were too large to get sent. Luckily, Turk's husband is a computer engineer, and he was able to build a platform to send the data.

As the technical aspect was coming together, Turk's blueprint was also gaining clarity. She would group questions by chapters of the person's life.

"I started organizing all these questions because it was like an obsession of mine, because I was scared, frankly," Turk said of her parents' health.

She settled on 10 chapters, or categories, ranging from childhood to education for the video time capsule.

Interest came to Turk from her friends, including one with a parent suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's disease.

"The more I started talking to people, the more I started realizing that there is nothing out there right now," she said.

So she went back to her husband Michael, who built the online infrastructure that merges the users' videos.

It works like this: You pay for a chapter to learn about a person. The relative would answer 10 questions, with up to three minutes for each.

"When he's done with the last question, the platform merges his answers together into a beautiful keepsake video," Turk said.

The video stays on the site, but is only privately accessed on their secure Cloud storage. Customers have the option to download the video. Because many older people will access or record the videos, Turk said the website was made as simple as possible to work.

They are opting for a one-time $36 per chapter, which includes storage forever, as opposed to charging a monthly subscription.

Turk said even though the site is in its infancy, they started at the best time.

"I can't picture a more meaningful gift to give someone in your family than the gift of them sharing their story," she said.

Turk said the idea of a relative leaving a video legacy through her website is poignant.

"It's personal to me, but it also immediately becomes personal to other people," Turk said.