About The AMERICAN LEGACIES Organization Inc.

Who We Are

Founded in 1996...

What We Preserve

  • Bibles containing family information
  • Community traditions
  • Diaries
  • Family stories
  • Funeral memories
  • Historic documents
  • Holiday memories and traditions 
  • Letters
  • Oral histories
  • Photographs of family and communities
  • Post Cards containing names and addresses
  • Video histories

Our Impact

  • 850+/- preserved stories 
  • Thousands of digitized photographs 
  • Nearly three decades of preservation work 
  • Free services offered to Senior Citizens,  provided by volunteers 

Why It Matters

         Every story matters because every life matters.

Our History

1996: 

  • American Legacies Org, Inc was founded by Franklin T. Wike, Jr. when he started interviewing senior citizens and began writing down their life stories and family memories. It originally started out as a labor of love that was privately funded by Mr. Wike.

     

  • With the assistance of multiple volunteer school teachers, willing to interview senior citizens and write stories, he started publishing those stories in  monthly booklets. 

2000: 

  • A staff of 50 volunteers from various parts of the U.S.A, donated their time, energy and love to assist us in capturing, publishing and preserving:
    • family stories, 
    • memories, 
    • old family recipes, 
    • genealogy information, 
    • military stories, 
    • old photographs

2002:  

  • We obtained our first two websites, in order to help publish and preserve the information we collected. 

     

  • We vowed to always make the information available FREE on the internet to anyone that wanted to read it.

2005: 

  • (pre-covid) American Legacies became partners in a family restaurant that was set up with a special area that was used to "interview" senior citizens, as well as volunteers that were donating their time to "type up the text" from audio recordings of interviews.

2010: 

  • We began encouraging Senior Citizens from across the U.S.A, that lived alone, to meet with other seniors at local restaurants for Christmas Dinner. This was our way of trying to help them get past the loneliness and depression of being alone during the holidays.

     

  • We began using multiple servers located in different parts of the country, to host our websites.  We use this for long-term preservation and redundancy-- making sure our information survives hardware failures, hosting changes, or other technical issues.

2015: 

  • We encouraged our volunteers to start attending ESTATE AUCTIONS, so they could purchase old photos of people, places and things. Our goal was to scan and upload these images to our website, so distant and future relatives would be able to download them FREE.

     

  • We began buying family bibles at estate auctions or sales,so we can try to locate distant relatives that would want to have them.

     

  • We started buying old historical documents such as school yearbooks or printed programs containing names and photographs of individuals, so we could scan and post them on our website, for distant or future relatives.

     

  • We purchased fireproof filing cabinets and safes in order to safeguard important photographs, books and documents.

2020:

  • We started conducting video interviews and offering a free copies of the video to the subject or family along with a printed copies of the edited text.

2024: 

  • American Legacies Org went from being a private enterprise, to a registered 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization run by a board of directors, instead of a single individual. This transition was made in order to assure the stories collected will continue to be preserved long after any one person is alive.

     

  • We held our FIRST FREE CHRISTMAS DINNER and PARTY, just for Senior Citizens that do not have family members close by, to share Christmas Dinner. This dinner came complete with OLD Christmas Music from the 1950's era and Cash Prizes for the most festive Christmas Outfit and a few free gifts.

2025:

  • We started going to Nursing Home type facilities, and conducting video interviews of the local residents, offering their current and future families Free Copies of the videos. 

     

  • We sponsored a Free Thanksgiving Meal for seniors that did not have family to celebrate with. 

     

  • Our Second Annual FREE CHRISTMAS DINNER and PARTY, offered a drawing so EVERY PERSON received a FREE CHRISTMAS GIFT.

2026:

  • We began capturing funeral services on video and offering a copy of the video FREE to current or future family members.

     

  • We started building a series of pages on our website, (not including the names in our genealogy database) containing the name of every person that wrote or was the subject of a story. Since we have in excess of 850 articles posted as of 7/17/26, this index will take a very long time to complete.

 What is the next step for an organization with nearly three decades of experience preserving history?

American Legacies wants to build an extraordinary archive of first-person accounts that historians, educators, genealogists, and families will be able to use for generations.

  • We plan to start donating booklets to libraries containing collections of Life Stories from residents of their local community.

     

  • We are adding a special VIDEO project to our Free Christmas Dinner. This will entail making videos of seniors talking about how they celebrated Christmas when they were a child. A free copy of the video, along with a free booklet containing the written text of the content shared, will be provided to each senior that participates, so they can give it to their family.

     

  • We are trying to locate volunteers that will assist us in opening " new chapters" of American Legacies in various locations across America . This will make it easier to offer the physical assistance to seniors that want to spend their final days in their own home.

     

  • As we continue, we want to become more than a digital preservation institution. We are striving to be a united effort from coast to coast, caring for and about senior citizens, while helping them to preserve their most precious memories, stories, images and treasures. Their LEGACY deserves to be preserved and shared with future generations, after their physical body and mind wears out.
     


All materials posted on our websites are protected by U.S. Copyrights belonging to the individuals communicating and sharing the stories with American Legacies Org, Inc and/or U.S. Legacies. This usually means the person or family writing the story and submitting it to American Legacies Org, Inc or U.S. Legacies, retains the copyright, however in the case of professional Freelance Writers, they MAY have written agreements with the family or person they are writing about.

American Legacies Org, Inc., U.S. Legacies com, U.S. Legacies Org, Older Bikers com, and Older Bikers org are all not-for-profit entities and subsidiaries of American Legacies Org, Inc.