The family vault
Our family's context in plain Markdown files we own. Everything else here sits on top of it.
Every family runs on context…what we decided about screen time last month, or where the car insurance card ended up. In our house most of that lived in my head, or got lost somewhere between apps and email threads.
AI tools are great at helping with exactly this kind of thing, but only if they know your life. Every new chat starts from zero, and the companies that offer to remember things for you keep that memory on their servers, in their format.
What it is
The family vault is a folder of plain Markdown files on hardware we control. Anyone can open them, and they’ll still be readable when my kids have kids.
We run it in Obsidian, a free notes app that works right on top of a folder like this instead of locking your notes inside its own database.
Right now it holds:
- Our family meeting notes, next week’s agenda, and an inbox anyone can drop things into
- The family policy: agreements we’ve made together, each one dated, and open to revisiting whenever someone asks
- Each person’s “hopes that beckon”…not goals to track, just directions they want to grow
- Household paperwork like insurance policies, report cards, school emails and vehicle documents
How we use it
I edit the vault in Obsidian on my laptop, and Obsidian Sync keeps it on my phone and iPad too. Another synced copy lives on a DigitalOcean droplet, a small cloud server we rent for about $6 a month. On the droplet runs a small piece of software (an MCP server, if you’re curious) that lets Claude read and write the vault securely from my phone.
If I’m in the car and remember we need to talk about allowance, I tell Claude and it lands in the meeting inbox. When a school form comes home, I snap a photo, and Claude reads it, files it in the right place and keeps the original. Weeks later I can ask when the car registration expires and get the answer from our own paperwork.
I’m planning to walk through the full setup on Augmented Ordinary.
Why plain files
The vault isn’t tied to any one AI. If a better tool shows up next year, it reads the same files. If a company changes its pricing or shuts down, we don’t lose anything.
It’s also what made everything else possible. The dashboard in our kitchen reads its daily page from the vault, and our weekly family meeting starts from its inbox.
If you want to try this
Start with one folder and one use. For us it was the meeting inbox…the hard part of a family meeting habit is capturing things during the week, and once that got easy, the meetings stuck.
Keep the human in the loop. Claude drafts and files things, but our decisions get made at the table, together, and the kids’ words go into the notes exactly as they said them.
More to come!