What Goes in Personal

Created by IronClad Family Support, Modified on Tue, Jul 28 at 11:04 AM by IronClad Family Support

Personal is where your family's identities, accounts, and the children who depend on you all live. Some of it is routine paperwork. Some of it — who raises your kids, how to get into your email — is among the most important information in your entire vault.

Seven subcategories live under Personal. Add a separate record for each person, account, or document.

New to how the forms work — required fields, reminder dates, attachments? Start with Understanding the Forms.

ID's

Passports, licenses, birth certificates, and other identity documents — one record per document, per person. Four people with passports means four records.

Document type (required) — passport, driver's license, state ID, birth certificate, Social Security card, marriage certificate, green card, military ID
Belongs to (required) — which family member
Document / ID number
Issuing authority
Expiration date (drives reminders)

Fill in every expiration date, even the ones years away — especially passports. Renewal takes weeks, and the discovery almost always happens at airport check-in for a trip you've already paid for. The reminder is what turns that scramble into a calm renewal months ahead.

Children & dependents

One record for each child or dependent adult in your care.

Name (required), relationship, date of birth
Who would care for them if you couldn't? — the guardian
School or daycare
Medical or special needs a caregiver must know
Anything else important about their care

Why the guardian question matters most of all: if something happens to you and your children's other parent, this is the field that answers “where do the kids go tonight?” Name the guardian here even if it's also written into your will — a will can take weeks to surface, and this is what someone reads on the first night. And name the person only after you've asked them. Raising a child is not a surprise anyone should receive.

Why the special-needs field matters: a caregiver stepping in has none of what you carry in your head — the allergy, the medication and its timing, the thing that soothes a frightened child at 2am. Write down what you'd say in the doorway on your way out. It's the difference between a scared child and a safe one.

Web, social media & devices

Online accounts, social media, and the passwords to your phones and computers. One record per account.

Service / site (required)
Username / email and password
2FA method — none, SMS, authenticator app, hardware key, email
On death: memorialize / close / transfer — what you want done with the account
Last changed (drives reminders)

Start with your email, and treat it as the master key: whoever controls your primary email can reset the password on almost everything else you own. Record it first, and record its 2FA method carefully. A password alone is useless if the verification code goes to a phone that's been shut off — note where the backup codes are kept. This single record is often what stands between your family and being locked out of your entire digital life.

Why the “on death” field matters: without it, your family is left guessing whether to keep your Facebook up as a memorial, quietly close it, or hand it to someone. Saying what you want spares them a decision they'll otherwise agonize over — and stops accounts from lingering, unmanaged, as targets for fraud.

If you'd rather not store raw passwords here, store the instructions for reaching your password manager instead — where it is and how to unlock it. That single record can stand in for dozens.

Photos

Your family pictures — and here you don't upload them one at a time. Paste a link to a whole album (Google Photos, iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive) and your family gets the collection.

Title / description (required)
A link to the album, or a single precious file attached directly
Issued by / reference number / renewal date — usually left blank for photos

Twenty years of family pictures shouldn't go in one JPEG at a time, and they don't need to. Note where the albums live, and the memories travel with everything else.

Correspondence, Vital documents & Other

Three flexible subcategories for anything that doesn't fit a specific form — important letters, documents you want kept, and everything else. They share a simple set of fields:

Title / description (required)
Issued by and reference number
Expiration / renewal date (drives reminders) — if the document has one

Give each one a clear title. “Marriage certificate – 2011” serves your family; “scan001” doesn't.

Understanding the Forms
What Goes in Legal — for guardianship as a legal instrument
Create and Maintain a Codicil — the digital-asset authorization for your online accounts