If you met me today, you might assume that preserving family stories, heritage and memories has always been important to me. The truth is that this journey began with a realisation: I could not answer many of the questions my own children were asking about our family.
As a teenager, I completed Hifz of the Qur’an and got married at the age of 18. I was the first person in my family to marry outside our culture.
Looking back, that decision marked the beginning of a period in which I gradually distanced myself from my wider family. Nobody told me to. I simply focused on building my own life, working and raising children.
Years later, as my children grew older, they began asking questions about relatives, family connections and where we came from. I wanted to teach them about respecting elders, maintaining family ties and understanding their roots.
The problem was that I did not know as much as I thought I did.
I knew names, but not many stories. I knew relatives, but not always the relationships. I could not explain the experiences and sacrifices that had shaped previous generations of our family.
That realisation led me to ask my eldest son to begin documenting our family tree on both my side of the family and my wife’s. It is something we continue to work on today.
Around the same time, I noticed something else. Children often remember the moments they were corrected or disciplined, but many of the happy memories fade away. I wanted my children to remember those moments too.
I bought a camera and started recording family holidays, Eid celebrations and ordinary days together. Not for social media, but simply so that one day we could look back and remember them.
Then I visited my great-grandmother’s grave. Despite having visited before, it took me more than an hour to find it again. Standing there, I realised how little I actually knew about her life. I knew her name, but very little about the person behind it.
Without realising it, all of these experiences were pointing in the same direction.
Then one evening, while I was sitting with my family, we were discussing a respected local community leader who had recently passed away. My mother remarked that much of what he had done for the community would eventually be forgotten because the memories would disappear with those who remembered him.
Later that same evening, my son scanned a QR code on television and commented on how easily information could be accessed.
Suddenly, the two ideas came together.
What if a simple QR code could connect people to a person’s story? What if photographs, videos, memories and life lessons did not have to disappear?
That conversation became the starting point for what would eventually become Moments by QR, a digital platform designed to help families preserve stories, memories, photographs and life experiences for future generations.
Alhamdulillah, two years later, the idea has become a reality. More importantly, it taught me that while names may be remembered, it is stories that help us understand who people truly were.
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