The eight commitments behind every line of code, every editorial decision, and every name we honor.
Effective May 6, 2026 · Version 1
We are a public memorial archive. These principles guide every decision we make about the platform, the editorial standard, and our stewardship of the names you trust us with.
Every line we ship is in service of one specific name being remembered with dignity. If a feature does not honor a name, we do not ship it.
We do not embellish, sanitize, or sensationalize. Real lives, told plainly, are the strongest stories. Sources are cited where we have them; oral tradition is honored as oral tradition.
Documented next of kin always carry weight in editorial decisions about a memorial — even when the original submitter disagrees. See our Takedown & Corrections policy for how this works in practice.
We only make permanence claims we can prove. Every featured memorial carries a public IPFS content identifier (CID) a stranger can verify on any public IPFS gateway, now and decades from now. Pinned by our own self-hosted IPFS node.
We never run third-party trackers or advertising on the public archive. We never sell or rent personal data. The only third parties our platform talks to are Stripe (for the paid tiers) and Let's Encrypt (for HTTPS certificates). Everything else runs on our own infrastructure.
Algorithms help us scale; humans make every editorial decision. AI may draft, transcribe, or de-duplicate. AI never publishes.
The archive belongs to the people whose names it carries and to the communities those names came from. The operating LLC (Abilities Finance, LLC, Wyoming) is a steward, not an owner.
Every system, every key, every relationship is built so that the archive continues if any single person steps away. The recovery runbook is the contract between us and the future. We are actively recruiting an advisory circle to make sure no single steward holds the archive's continuity in their hands.
Email info@honoredancestors.com — we read every message ourselves.