A person, not a company

Heriteo began with my wife's family in France. Her parents' house had to go — the one in the photograph below — and seven children had to work out what became of everything inside it.

Seven heirs, and every situation you can imagine between them: some a short drive away, some who had not walked through the house in years, and my wife an ocean and a continent away in California. Everyone had a claim on the same objects. Nobody had the same picture of what was there.

What we ran into was not a valuation problem. Anyone can price a wardrobe. What could not be replaced was knowing which grandmother a portrait came from, why a clock mattered, who had already been promised what. That knowledge lived in two or three people's heads, and it was leaving with the house.

So I built what we needed: one catalogue the whole family could see, where an object carries its story and every heir can say plainly what they hope happens to it. The objects in the screenshots across this site are theirs. So is the house on our 404 page — and so is Tante Pauline, beside these lines.

That first version ran from 2022 to 2024. Then I used it on my own family — my great-grandfather was a wheelwright, and the story on his caliper was written by my father, who watched him work — and rebuilt Heriteo around what both families had taught me.

Heriteo is still a solo project. There is no team behind this page and no investors, just one developer in California. If you are about to trust it with your family's things, you should know it was built for a real family first, and that they are still using it.