The Identities Module
One entry per family member — legal names, government IDs, controlling email accounts, recovery dependencies, and where original documents live.
Where this Module fits
A-02 Module 2 of 8 in the At-Home area — step 2 of 4 on the dependency ladder (System → At-Home → Financial → Estate).
First of the connected trio — who are we? Everything in the next two modules flows from the identities documented here.
Part 1 of 3 in the connected At-Home trio — work Identities, then Subscriptions and Memberships, then Digital Legacy, in that order. See The Connected Trio for the worked example.
Adds to The Secure Guide: One entry per person — IDs, controlling emails, recovery dependencies, document locations.
Adds to The Family Guide: That identity records exist, where they live, the steward, and who to call.
Every Module adds one section to each guide — that is how the two guides assemble as you work. See what you're building.
Text file — the flexible one. Use it as-is, paste it into a spreadsheet, open it in any editor, or paste it into an AI tool to reshape the blank form to fit your family: rename a field, add a row, drop one you don't need.
Print / PDF — the ready-to-use one. Print it and fill it in by hand, or choose Save as PDF and complete it in your own offline PDF app. Either way it stays with you — the finished Secure Guide template goes inside your Vault.
One rule: only ever give an AI tool the blank template. Never paste your real information — passwords, account numbers, anything you'd keep secret — into an AI tool, an online service, or anywhere outside your own Vault. Customizing an empty form is fine; filling it in happens privately, offline. That's the same rule this site follows: nothing sensitive ever leaves your hands.
Secure Guide Starter Template — Identities
Store this inside your Vault. One entry per family member — update at the annual review, or whenever documents or primary accounts change.
This Module answers the trio's first question: who are we? It documents the credentials that establish personhood and enable everything else — the papers and the primary accounts. Children's entries grow with them: an infant's is a birth certificate and where it lives; a teenager's adds the emails that actually matter; at eighteen the entry becomes theirs — ask what they want kept in the family system, and respect the answer. If someone isn't comfortable being cataloged, record what you can (where a document lives, that a license exists) and leave the rest. Partial documentation is better than none.
Two habits make this record worth keeping. Accounts are rarely lost to a guessed password — they are lost through the recovery path, worked by a patient, convincing request. So map the chain (which account resets which), then harden it: retire recovery options that rest on guessable facts or on inboxes no one checks. And treat security-question answers like passwords — random, recorded in the password manager, never factual. A mother's maiden name is public; a deliberately wrong answer only the record knows is not.
These identities are the foundation of the connected trio. Next, the Subscriptions and Memberships Module ties each service to an identity documented here (reference it — don't re-enter it), and the Digital Legacy Module decides what happens to it all. See The Connected Trio page on this site for the worked example.
Family Guide Starter Template — Identities
This template contains no sensitive information. It can be stored with household documents.
In the matching Secure Guide section: one entry per person — IDs, controlling emails, recovery dependencies, document locations.
That detail is what makes recovery possible — and it is protected in the Vault, which opens with The Vault Key. The key is never written here, by design. The people listed on this page know how it is kept, and the steward's job is to keep that path current, so this page never leads to a locked door.
If a request for an identity document, a reset code, or a birthday arrives as a family member — by voice, message, or video — verify it the family way first: call back on a number already in this Guide, or use the family confirmation. A familiar voice is not, by itself, identity.
Anything this page's reader should know that the sections above didn't ask for — the exceptions, the house quirks, the thing you would say out loud while handing this page over.
For more information on how to use these templates, see The Recoverable Family book.
Worked example — Frank's family
Frank assumed the identity paperwork was the simple part — until his father passed away unexpectedly and Frank spent three weeks trying to reach the email account that would have unlocked everything else. No idea which address his father used, where a password might be, what accounts existed. His own family would face the same problem. He started here: four weeks, one entry per person. Document numbers and expirations are recorded in Frank's real entries — redacted in this published example; the email addresses shown, like every detail here, are fictional.
All details are fictional and illustrative. The assembled example guides live at the example Secure Guide and the example Family Guide.
Secure Guide — Frank's entry
Four entries in the At-Home folder of Frank's encrypted Secure Guide volume — one per family member — plus the family-history pointer:
Entry 1 — Frank
Entry 2 — Sarah
Entry 3 — Lily (17)
Entry 4 — Jacob (15)
Six months later the record paid for itself twice: Lily's college applications needed her birth certificate and SSN card — found in under two minutes — and Sarah's passport renewal was flagged before it could become an airport problem.
Family Guide — Frank's entry
This entry sits in the household reference binder. It lists no numbers, no addresses, no account names.
House rule, learned the easy way: any request for an ID, a reset code, or “just confirm your birthday” that arrives as a family member gets the family check first — call back on a number in this Guide. A familiar voice is not, by itself, identity.