Welcome to Legacy Carvers
Stories, Tools, and Reflections for Building a Life That Outlasts You
Hi, I’m Nancy. By day, I manage software developers. By night, I chase ancestors.
Legacy Carvers is the newsletter where those two worlds meet.
Come explore with me, and let's figure out what it means to build a legacy. I think it's about more than just piecing together the past, don't you? It’s also about living a story today that’s worth telling tomorrow—through mentorship, navigating hard moments with grace, making peace with the aging process, and using new tech to preserve the stories that matter. If you're the family storyteller or hope to create something that ripples forward, this spot is for you.
Here’s what you can expect in your inbox:
Second Half Notes: Reflections on aging, career, loss, and love in life’s later years.
Connection Stories: Unexpected messages, long-lost cousins, and the thrill of research breakthroughs.
Field Notes for Memory Keepers: Practical wisdom—how to structure eulogies, use AI to preserve memories, or record your thoughts on the run.
The Legacy Lab: Join my personal experiments with tech and storytelling! We'll try things like digitizing Mom's voice or turning a still photo of great grandpa into a video (sometimes a little creepy, always interesting!)
If this sounds like your kind of journey, I invite you to subscribe and join the conversation. Everything here is free for everyone. When I come up with a snazzy product for sale, you’ll be the first to know ; )
Note on use of AI: It’s cool these days to write a “policy” … that sounds long and boring. My policy is that I use it. I like to do my own writing. But if I get stuck I’ll bounce ideas off of it. I will use it for research, but only as a starting point. All links must be followed and double checked. I also use AI to brainstorm, come up with titles, help me find typos and missing commas (we both miss some, though) and as a thesaurus. Sometimes it writes python code for me or Obsidian data view queries. When I experiment with things like voice cloning or handwriting transcription, I write about it, so no need to add to the policy. Are you bored yet? That’s how policies are. Very. Boring.
