My name is Joshua Purvis, and I co-founded DearGrandkids with my dad, Mark, in 2014 as a side project within his fast-growing video production business.
My dad entered the industry in the late 1990s, when I was still a small child. Growing up, my brother Jake and I helped him with anything and everything related to video. Eventually, we were hired and worked at the studio ourselves through our teens and early twenties.
Our entire lives, we knew Dad as the man behind the camera, never the one in front of it. Most of our family videos and photographs are missing one person because the camera was always in his hands.
When we talked about the business, we would often joke that one day we needed to turn the camera around and record his own legacy story for us to share with the grandkids.
In April 2023, my otherwise healthy 54-year-old father was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, or GBM, and given approximately one year to live. He passed away from brain cancer one year and three weeks later.
We never turned the camera around.
His story will now be told to his grandchildren by those of us who are still here, using the photographs, videos, recipes, traditions, and memories we have left.
We never thought something like this would happen to our family. Then it did.
DearGrandkids exists because stories should not depend on the people left behind to remember every detail. They should be heard in the voice of the person who lived them.
Carrying my father's vision forward is deeply personal to me. As a son, a father, and a man, I feel a responsibility to help families preserve the stories, lessons, traditions, humor, and love that make them who they are.
There may never be a perfect time to sit down and tell your story. But there is value in doing it while the stories are still yours to tell.
We approach every story with the care it deserves, because someone in the family may still be watching it a hundred years from now.
