How Missionary Legacy works

• •Collects every weekly letter automatically, in order, for the whole mission.
• •Reads each letter and tracks the threads — the people they meet, the places they serve, the miracles, the growth.
• •Composes it into a real biography (not a folder of emails) — the kind of book you'd find on a shelf.
• •Keeps the people, a map of every area, a journey timeline, and all the photos organized alongside it.
• •Lets the whole family read along and contribute, then hands you a finished, printable book at the end.

Every word in the book is your missionary's own, composed from their actual letters and checked line by line against them. We never invent events, feelings, names, or quotes. Place and culture facts are drawn from public sources and clearly labeled as background — never put in their mouth.

Open missionarylegacy.com in Safari and sign in. Tap the Share button (the square with the arrow, bottom of the screen), scroll a little, and tap Add to Home Screen, then Add. That’s the whole install.

Then — this order matters on iPhone — open the new Missionary Legacy icon from your home screen, go to Family, and tap Turn on notifications. (Apple only allows notifications for sites that live on your home screen, which is why the install comes first.)

Open missionarylegacy.com in Chrome and sign in. Tap the ⋮ menu (top right) → Add to Home screen (some phones say Install app) → Install. Then go to Family and tap Turn on notifications. Order doesn’t matter on Android — but the home-screen icon is still worth it.

Chrome, Edge, and Safari on a Mac can all take notifications straight from the browser — same button on the Family page, no install needed.

Sign up and create an archive — this is your family's private space. One account can hold several archives if you have more than one missionary out (now or later).

Add their name, the mission, and the start/return dates, and upload a photo for the first page of the book. The dates matter: they're how photos and letters get filed into the right time and place automatically. You can edit any of this later.

Invite parents, siblings, and grandparents. Each person gets their own login and a role (see "Family roles" below). Everyone can read along; you choose who can manage settings.

This is the one step that makes everything else automatic — it has its own section next.

Every archive has its own private email address (you'll find it in the app). Anything sent there is read, dated, and filed into the correct mission week. It's unique to your archive and safe to keep private.

Ask your missionary to put your archive’s address in the weekly email they already write home — To, CC or BCC, whichever they like. One change, once, and every letter from then on files itself. It takes ten seconds from the phone, and the welcome email we send your missionary includes the address, so they never have to ask you for it.

Most families never need this. Set it up only if your missionary would rather not, or you want the letters captured even on a week they forget:

1. 1In Gmail: Settings → "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" → "Add a forwarding address" → paste your capture address.
2. 2Google emails a confirmation code to us, and we forward it straight to you. Paste it into Gmail or tap the link and forwarding is on — only you can finish this step, because Google requires it.
3. 3Settings → "Filters" → "Create a new filter" → in "From," put your missionary's email → "Forward it to" your capture address.

From then on, every letter arrives on its own. (Outlook and Apple Mail have the same kind of rule under their settings.)

Doing this from your phone?: The Gmail app doesn’t include Forwarding settings — that’s Gmail, not you. Open gmail.com in your phone’s browser, tap the ⋮ menu and choose “Desktop site,” and the steps above appear. Two minutes, one time — or do it later from any computer; letters you forward by hand still file correctly in the meantime.

Prefer to do it by hand? Just forward each weekly email to the capture address when it arrives. We'll nudge you with an opt-in reminder so a week never slips by.

Any photos attached to those emails are pulled out and cataloged automatically, dated, and filed into the right area. (You can also bulk-import a whole album — see Photos.)

Each week, after the new letter comes in, the biographer may surface a gentle follow-up — "Who was Brother Tony?" or "What was that baptism day like?" — to fill in the parts a quick letter skips.

Those questions never send on their own. They wait on the Prompts page for you to approve, edit, or skip. Nothing reaches your missionary without your say-so — you're always in control of what's asked and when.

Family members can write their own letters to the missionary right from the app — with photos attached, and a checkbox to send a copy to other family members. Those letters are saved into the story alongside the missionary's, so the book holds both sides.

Each family member also gets their own private write-in address — emailing it sends the letter to the missionary AND files it in the archive under exactly the right person. And anyone can opt into a weekly nudge to write; simply replying to the nudge sends the letter, no login needed.

When the missionary replies to an approved question, their answer lands on the Their Answers page — every response they've ever sent, in their own words, for the whole family to read.

The dashboard and timeline show the mission filling in week by week — letters, photos, milestones, and the themes that keep recurring.

The archive continuously cross-checks its own record — a baptism mentioned in a call but missing its date on the poster, people from letters waiting to be placed, questions sitting unapproved — and lists anything that needs a human on the dashboard, each with a link straight to the fix. When the card is empty, the record is caught up. The same list rides the weekly founders email, so nothing waits silently.

The moment a new letter arrives, every family member gets an email with an excerpt and the photos — no one has to remember to check.

On the Family page you'll find a share card with your missionary's follow link. Anyone who opens it can subscribe with just an email address — no account, no password — and from then on they receive each weekly letter (photos included) as it arrives. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe, and the Family page shows how many people are following along.

• •An opening with the themes that defined the mission — found across all the letters, not picked from a list.
• •A Part for the country and people, the call, each area served, the people they taught, the tender mercies, and coming home.
• •Each Part opens with a scripture plate and is written from the actual letters of that stretch.
• •Their verbatim letters and the photo galleries follow the narrative as the backup record.

Choose how the book reads (the style and voice). Don't like a chapter? Give it plain feedback — "warmer," "let their words carry more," "you missed Elder Tan" — and it rewrites. Every earlier draft is kept, so you can always go back.

Included photos appear as full-page gallery spreads at the end of each area. The Photo Studio is where you choose which photos make the book, set each area's lead photo, write captions, and reorder.

Before any chapter is kept, it's checked against the source letters to strip anything not actually there, and figurative language (an analogy, a bit of hyperbole) is read as intended, never as literal fact. This is the promise that makes the book trustworthy.

Each chapter has an Approve toggle — approved chapters show a gold border, and the printed book waits until every drafted chapter carries your approval. If a chapter is ever rewritten, it steps back to unapproved and the previous draft is kept, so nothing reaches print without a family member having read the exact words.

When you're ready, order a bound keepsake — and additional copies for grandparents and siblings. (The book is printed by us to keep the quality and binding consistent.)

Each edition price buys a ~400-page volume, and the Book page shows a live estimate of where you stand. Include everything — every letter home, every photo, every call — and a full mission honestly becomes two or three volumes; trim what rides along to fit fewer. The dials: letters from home (full, excerpts, a condensed digest written by the biographer and labeled as such, or archive-only), weekly-call summaries (in each area’s chapter, with a per-call switch on the call’s own page), photos (all, or the best 50 per area), and the missionary’s journal (large plates woven into the chapters). Sealed small-plates entries print only when the missionary shares them from their own locked journal. Volumes split at area boundaries, and you can name each one — or keep the defaults, which read like chapters of the journey. The archive itself always keeps everything; these choices only decide what goes to paper.

The missionary’s sealed spiritual journal can be printed as a separate volume that only they ever read: the family can order it and pay for it, but the missionary approves the print, and the book arrives sealed — theirs alone. Imagine handing it to them at homecoming: their own words, kept for a wise purpose. Available when printing opens.

A directory of everyone in the mission: companions, the people they taught and baptized, the members and families who fed and sustained them, and local leaders. As letters arrive, the biographer reads them and finds these people for you — nobody is ever silently added.

New people wait in a gold card on the Connections page, strongest evidence first. Each one shows why it's suggested — a confidence level with its reason ("a baptism is described · named in 2 letters") and the actual line from the letters. You pick what each person is (someone they taught, baptized, a member, a leader…) and tap Add; the ✕ means "not worth keeping," and that name is never suggested again.

Your corrections teach it: If the suggestion guessed "member" and you choose "baptized," that correction is remembered — the next reading of the letters applies what you taught it. The low-confidence names at the bottom are its weakest guesses; dismissing them costs nothing and makes it smarter.

When a letter suggests a transfer to a new area or a new companion, it waits in a small confirm card — with the exact sentence from the letter that suggested it, so you can see why. Confirming a transfer adds the area to the map and timeline and closes out the old one; the ✕ dismisses a suggestion for good (a day trip isn't an area, and it won't be suggested twice). District friends who aren't companions get their own "Other missionary" button, so the companion list stays true.

Every area served and every person plotted on a map, so you can see the whole mission's geography at a glance and click straight into any place or person.

A keepsake timeline of the entire mission — the arc from the first area to homecoming, transfer by transfer.

At the top you'll find the themes that keep surfacing across all the letters — the handful of threads that make this mission theirs. These become the opening of the book. If one doesn't ring true, dismiss it with the ✕ — it's set aside for good, kept out of the story and the book, and won't come back.

The biographer also pulls out the small, vivid details a summary would lose — a name, a funny moment, a tender one — and asks the family to expand on them. Tap Tell us more on any of these, write what you remember, and your words are kept alongside theirs; the best of them make it into the book. The ✕ sets a moment aside if it isn't one worth keeping.

1. 1Say who’s opening the call — their name, and Elder or Sister. That’s the whole form, plus your name and email so we can send you the link back.
2. 2Share the guest link. Anyone with it can guess where they’re going.
3. 3Set the day you’ll open it when you know it, and paste your meeting link — your own Zoom or Google Meet room, so the grandparents four states away are in the room too.
4. 4Tell everyone the date. One checkbox emails it to every person who has already guessed, from your name. Saving a date doesn’t send anything on its own — picking a day and telling forty people are different decisions.
5. 5Open it, then tap reveal. Everyone who guessed gets an email telling them where.

Guests give a name and a guess. Email is optional — it’s only so we can tell them the answer. They can also ask to receive your missionary’s letters while they serve, which puts them on your follow list, sent by your family. Guesses show up on the page as they come in, so the whole thing has a scoreboard by the time you open it.

Guests see a first name and a last initial — never a full name, an address, or your email.

When everyone is in the room, tap Record the openingin your console. A guest called “Missionary Legacy (recording)” joins the meeting and records it in video. It only ever joins because you pressed a button, and it’s named the way it is so that everyone in the room can see it arrive — nobody is recorded without watching it happen.

A few minutes after you finish, the file is waiting in the same console with a download button. It is yours from that moment, whether or not you ever become a customer.

Worth doing: Start the recorder a minute before the envelope comes out. It joins the room, not the past.

If you go on to build an archive, the opening comes with you: it’s linked to your family, the three-month clock disappears, and the video sits with your photos for good. The printed book carries a code beside the opening pages that plays it — so the first thing anyone opening the book can do is watch the moment you all found out.

If you don’t build an archive, we hold the recording for three monthsand email you more than once, well before the end, reminding you to take your copy. It is a deadline on our storage, never a lever on you — and nothing is ever deleted that we haven’t warned you about at least twice.

Most families do — on a phone, over Zoom, on Facebook Live. That video still belongs in the book. On the Call Opening page you can upload your own recording and it’s treated exactly the same: it joins your photos, and the book prints a code beside the opening pages that plays it. Uploading is part of what the one-time setup covers, so it appears once your archive’s setup is paid.

Your family has its own permanent call link — the same one every week, on the Calls page. Use it and the call keeps itself: we join, the recording runs, and a few minutes after you hang up the transcript and the week’s moments are waiting for you. No Google subscription, no folder to share, no button to remember at the start of a call you have been waiting seven days for.

One thing worth knowing: the recording begins when we join, and we arrive about a minute before you do. Start the call a minute early and the first hello is in it. Join at the exact second and the first sentence or two may not be.

Before the call you can tick who is going to be on it. That is not for us — it is so the transcript knows whose voice is whose, and a name in the book is the right name instead of “Home 2.”

Sometimes the call happens on WhatsApp, or a phone, or Messenger. Nothing is lost. On the Calls page, under Talked somewhere else?, you can record the call from your own phone on speakerphone, connect a folder of recordings, or paste a transcript from anywhere — anything shaped like “Name: what they said.” The archive treats it exactly the same afterwards.

Whichever way a call is captured, tell everyone on it. An archive of your family’s own voices is a gift; a recording nobody knew about is something else.

Every captured call can be opened again, like a letter: a short written account of the call, each moment and what you decided about it, the full transcript, and — for in-app recordings — the audio itself to listen to again. Open any call from the list on the Calls page. Transcripts and audio are visible only to the family’s archive managers.

Recorded something by mistake? A recording can be discarded before you save it, and any captured call can be deleted from its page — the transcript, its unreviewed moments, and the audio are all removed together. Moments you already kept stay in the story; keeping them was your decision, and deletions never undo it.

Open any call and every piece shows its state as a color: green is in the book and the Story, red stays in the archive only, yellow means the biographer suggests keeping it private — the decision is still yours — and uncolored is undecided. The summary card works the same way, with its own in-the-book switch.

Every moment can be edited before you keep it— your words win over the biographer’s, always. Kept moments land in the Story’s small moments, where “Tell us more” can grow them into the book. And if a whole call came out wrong (“the sister’s name is Adjoua” · “you missed the taxi story”), editing is always free and always final— rewrite the summary or any moment in your own words and re-runs won’t overwrite you. Each call also gets 3 biographer re-runs, steered with choices (shorter · more detail · more of the missionary’s exact words · warmer · just the facts, plus a focus and name corrections) — enough to get it right without turning the biographer into a slot machine. Green and red decisions are never touched by a re-run. (Reading never re-runs anything.)

Everything else in the archive is family-visible by default. Calls are the opposite: the transcript is visible only to you and other admins. Never the whole family, never the people following along, never the printed book. A call is your missionary speaking freely to their parents — they may say things about someone else’s circumstances, or about a leader, that were never meant to travel.

From each call you get a short list of moments — a story, a line worth quoting, a milestone, someone they met. Each one shows the actual words behind it, and anything the biographer judged to be private is flagged before you decide. Keep this puts it in the story; Set aside leaves it in the call for good. Nothing crosses that line without you.

Missions decide which apps a missionary may use, and Google Chat is one of the few they permit. So you type on the Chats page and it reaches them there — on the phone they already carry, in the app they are already allowed to open. Your missionary accepts one invitation, once, and that is the whole setup. If it ever looks like they aren’t seeing you, there is a Send the invite again link under the message box; press it as often as you like.

Everyoneis the family room — the shared conversation, with everyone’s name on what they said. Alongside it, each person can have their own private threadwith your missionary: a sister asking something she would not ask in front of her parents, a grandmother saying something meant for no one else.

Those private threads are genuinely private. Not from us as a courtesy — from everyone, including parents. A parent can decide whether a child has a private line at all, on the Family page. A parent cannot read it. Those are different powers on purpose, and we would rather defend the second than be popular for breaking it.

Six weeks in, a missionary starts thinking in French, or Spanish, or Twi. Let them. Any message they send can be translated with one tap, and both versions are kept — their words and what the words mean. In twenty years the fact that they wrote “Merci ohh” instead of “thank you” will be the part you are glad nobody smoothed over.

A message from them chimes if you have the page open, marks the conversation as waiting, and reaches your phone as a notification if you have added the app to your home screen (see Put it on your phone). A private thread notifies only the person whose thread it is — a notification that leaked onto six lock screens would undo exactly what the thread promises.

Most of a chat is logistics, and the book is better for leaving it out. But now and then something arrives that belongs in the story — a companion’s letter forwarded on a birthday, a paragraph your missionary wrote at midnight. Hover any message and choose Keep for the book.

It will ask who wrote it. Answer honestly, especially if your missionary forwarded someone else’s words: the book will quote it in that person’s voice, and a companion’s tribute credited to your missionary reads like something they said about themselves.

1. 1On the Photos page, drag in as many photos as you like — or drop the .zip you downloaded from a shared Google Photos album.
2. 2To get the zip: open the shared album in Google Photos → the ⋯ menu → "Download all." Google hands you a zip; drop it in — no need to unzip first.
3. 3Hit "Add photos" and watch the counter. Everything uploads in the background; keep the tab open until it's done.

Better yet: paste the missionary's shared Google Photos album link (or a Google Drive folder link) into the connect card on the Photos page — once. Every photo they add afterward imports itself, about hourly, for the rest of the mission. You can pause or disconnect it anytime.

Captions typed in Google Photos don’t travel through the shared-album watcher — Google doesn’t expose them there. To bring them in: go to takeout.google.com → Deselect all → check Google Photos→ “All photo albums included” → pick just the mission album → Export. Download the zip and drop the whole ziponto the Photos page. Photos already in the archive are recognized — no doubles — and their captions attach to them, in the missionary’s own words. A caption someone in the family already typed by hand is never overwritten.

The missionary also has a photos-only address (on their profile beside the letter address). Pictures emailed there — no letter required — file straight into the gallery, dated and sorted into the right area. Handy for P-day photo dumps from a phone.

• •Each photo is filed by its own capture date into the area being served then.
• •Duplicates are collapsed — re-importing the same album won't create doubles.
• •Originals are kept at full resolution for the printed book; the app shows lighter versions to stay fast. Tap any photo to view it large.
• •Photos sent with letters from home stay in their own "From home" section — with the correspondence, never mixed into the mission galleries or the book.

Letters lag transfers, so a photo occasionally files into the previous area. Fixing it is quick, and it's your call that sticks:

• •In any area's gallery, tap Select, pick the photos that don't belong, and Move them to the right area — or mark them From home if they're family photos that aren't mission photos at all. Nothing is ever deleted.
• •If the same place shows up twice under different names ("MTC" and "Provo MTC"), use Merge duplicates on the Areas page — photos, companions, and events all move to the one you keep.
• •After fixing an area's dates, Re-file photos (also on the Areas page) re-settles everything by date in one click and tells you what moved.
• •Anything you file by hand stays put — the automatic filing never overrides a person's decision.

This is where you curate for the book: star which photos appear, set each area's header photo, add captions, and drag to reorder. Nothing about the book's photos is all-or-nothing — you choose exactly what's in, and your choices stick.

Every missionary has a private, passcode-locked journal — separate from everything the family sees. It's for their most personal entries: the things worth writing that aren't for the weekly letter.

In the fashion of Nephi, the journal keeps two records: the small plates— the spiritual record, sealed behind the missionary’s passcode, theirs alone — and the large plates— the day-to-day history, which parents can open and read, just as Nephi’s large plates were the open record. Each has its own address (in the missionary’s weekly email, one tap each): record a voice memo, attach, send. It comes back transcribed for a one-tap approval before a word lands — and the recording itself is kept — the words forever, the audio playable while the archive is live — so the family has their voice, not just their words. Even while sealed, the family can see the small plates growing — how many entries, and when — without reading any of it.

An honest note: most missionaries now write their president inside the Church's missionary portal, and those entries can't be captured by us or anyone. What can be kept: anything the missionary emails to their private journal address stays sealed behind the passcode, and the Mission President page lets the family record the moments he taught them — a line from an interview or a zone conference, written down while it's fresh. Those quotes become part of the story.

The missionary sets their own passcode. From the journal page, an admin can save the missionary's recovery email and email them a one-time link to set it themselves — so it's truly theirs.

On the lock screen (or at /journal-recovery), "forgot passcode" sends a one-time link to their recovery email to set a new one. For security, the passcode itself is never emailed — only a link to choose a new one, and that link expires after an hour.

• •The account owner and admins manage the archive — settings, billing, the book, and inviting family.
• •Members read along and contribute: letters to the missionary, photos, answers, and journal entries.
• •You decide each person's role, and you can change it anytime.

One sign-in can belong to several archives. A grandmother with two missionaries out — in two different families — accepts both invitations with the same email, and a switcher appears in her sidebar to hop between them. Each archive keeps its own role for her (she might manage one and simply read the other), notifications on her phone arrive from all of them, and each family’s archive stays completely separate — joining one never shows anyone the other.

• •Your archive is completely sealed off from every other family's — no one outside your family can see it.
• •Nothing is ever auto-deleted. Every letter, transcript, chat and the book stay readable, free, forever. Photos, recordings and video stay live through the mission and six months after; the optional Granite Vault keeps them live beyond that, or they rest sealed — never destroyed, and restorable within a few days.
• •It's yours to keep for generations — that's the whole point.

If you joined with a founders code, your missionary’s archive is free — for good — as a thank-you for helping shape the product with your feedback (printed books are priced separately). The founders seat covers one missionary; adding another is a standard subscription (the feedback that earns the seat doesn’t double with a second missionary — but the archive quality does, so many families add one anyway).

Other families use a simple plan that keeps the archive growing through the mission. The printed keepsake book and the optional Granite Vault — which keeps photos and recordings live beyond the six months after the mission — are separate items. You're never charged without a clear heads-up first.

Your Family page has your referral link: a family who joins through it gets half off setup, and you earn $20 toward your printed bookonce they’ve been subscribed three months. Missionary families know missionary families.

No — they keep writing home as usual. The most they'll ever do is reply to a question email, and only if you've approved sending it.

Forward it whenever you can — it files into the right week by its date. The reminders are there so misses are rare.

Happens — letters lag transfers. See "If a photo lands in the wrong place" — moving it is two taps, and your fix is permanent.

No. The book is composed from the real letters and checked against them. Background facts about places are sourced and labeled as context.

See the FAQ or contact us — a real person will help.