It was the one comfort Kensington’s Margo Brandano desperately wanted as she drove back home from a stressful parenting moment in New York: the wisdom of her own late mother’s voice. “She always had a way of putting things into perspective,” she says. “I would have given anything to pick up a phone and just hear her.” Months later, Brandano was attending the funeral of a friend, when a similar longing returned during a photo retrospective. “I kept thinking how much more personal it could be if we’d had a recording of her voice. That’s the thing when people pass away. You never hear that voice again. It’s an incredible loss.”

So Brandano approached her husband Al, an airline pilot and marketing executive, with an idea: to devise a way for people to record their own messages and memories by phone or computer so loved ones could access their voice forever. Of particular importance, she felt, was giving soldiers overseas and their families the ability, at no cost, to record messages of love and support for one another. So Al contacted a close friend, Exeter software executive Eric Peterson, and together they compiled a team of contacts in the corporate community to create Remembered Voices – an online database accessible via the web or telephone that allows users to permanently store and listen to voice recordings. “Anyone can write a story,” Al Brandano says. “But when you say it in your own words with your own intonation and inflection, it’s something that can’t be duplicated.”

This past Memorial Day, with support from local businesses and residents, Remembered Voices handed 500 voice cards – worth upwards of $25,000 – to returning soldiers and those headed for Iraq and Afghanistan through Portsmouth’s Pease Greeters. “These young men and women sacrifice so much for us,” Al Brandano says. “For them to know before they go into harm’s way that they can hear the voice of a loved one has got to be an incredible source of comfort.”

Since launching in February, Remembered Voices has been just that for Stratham mom Claire Denton, who suffers from a neuromuscular disorder that severely limits her speech, and whose husband Jason was an Air National Guard member serving overseas. “There are so many stories I want to tell my kids, so many things I want them to hear, but I can’t always give that to them,” says Denton. “Plus, when you have a spouse or a loved one who’s away… and they’re on completely different schedules and time zones, it can be a tremendous challenge… This program has really shown me the awesome power of voice.”

Remembered Voices is generously offering 50 Troubadour readers a free voice card to record memories, messages, poetry and ‘verbal family trees’ of their own. For more information, call (603) 583-4880 or visit www.RememberedVoices.com.