Swansongs is a global service established for archiving and dispatching legacy letters for at least the next one hundred years. We are currently based in Southern England, though the details of our archive are restricted.
As custodians of your legacy, we honour four fundamental rules:
- We will never, or allow others to ever, open your legacy envelopes
- We will protect and secure your envelopes until they are ready to be dispatched
- We will dispatch your envelopes to arrive to who*, when and where you instruct us
- We will protect your personal details, and guarantee your anonymity
*unless recipient has died, check our Next Best Relative policy
Guaranteeing anonymity is very important to us, but it does make endorsements difficult. We would love to add a testimonials page to this site, tell the stories of letters received, and messages sent. But, we need your help to do that. We would be thrilled to hear about what you have put into your Swansongs envelopes, or about the wonderful swansongs envelope you’ve received. Your story will help spread the word, and give others the opportunity to experience the life changing gift you have. If you have a story to tell, please get in touch through our contact page.
Planning your legacy up to a hundred years into the future is bound to spring the occasional surprise. In the unfortunate event of your chosen recipient having died before your letter is set to arrive, we will research their family and nominate a Next Best Relative. In most cases this will be the eldest descendant, but in the case of no descendants, we will send to the closest living relative. This way we feel we can insure your letter still maintains much of its impact within its intended family.
You can choose to opt out of the Next Best Relative Policy by ticking the box on the details form in the pack. In such cases your letter would be permanently archived until such time that its contents are deemed to have historic importance.
The idea for Swansongs came nearly thirty years ago, when our founder resigned from his job in a busy accounts office. Sad to be leaving his friends and colleagues he wrote a handful of paper notes and hid them in places around the office they would not be found easily. Poked into the air vent of the ventilation system, taped to the bottom of the photocopier, wedged amongst piles of paper in the stationary cupboard. Each hidden more deviously so to extend the length of time before discovery. Every note told the finder about who he was, what he did for the company, and the people he used to work with.
As it turned out, it took many years for some of those notes to be discovered, and the warm feeling it gave him when old colleagues got in touch to tell him how they’d found them set the wheels of Swansongs in motion.
In a recent interview, he was asked why Swansongs is so important to him:
“To me it’s more than just about legacy, it’s a chance to still be around after I’m dead. It’s not quite the same as living forever, I grant you, but it’s much more than just some worn out old headstone by a grave nobody visits. Sure, I’m reduced to this handful of letters, but it means even a hundred years from now, I’ve still got some influence on this world, one or two tricks still left up my sleeve. I could tell you it’s about all the things I want to say to my children, and their children, but for me, I think it’s something else, an insatiable deep seated desire, I just need to be remembered.”