Co-founders Roy Moëd and Yvette Conn registered another landmark moment for ever-growing LifeBook Memoirs when they hosted a salon event titled The Value of Legacy at The Colony Hotel, a historic Palm Beach icon, on April 2, 2026.
The gathering brought together a curated audience of past LifeBook authors, supporters, philanthropists, and those who care deeply about the meaning, impact, and legacy of what they pass on to future generations.
Fittingly, the event grew out of a chance encounter. Roy first met two of his fellow panelists, Jean Shafiroff and Sebastian Clarke, at a Palm Beach charity ball, where he found himself seated between them entirely at random. Some eighteen months on, and with a number of private memoirs and autobiographies since completed in the community, the three returned to the stage—with LifeBook Memoirs co-founder Yvette Conn completing the line-up—to explore what we truly leave behind through family, values, purpose, memory, stories, and objects.
Roy framed the afternoon around three pillars of legacy: impact, inheritance, and the story that connects them. His inspiration, he explained, came from watching the philanthropy of Jean Shafiroff alongside the work of auctioneer Sebastian Clarke.
“Seeing those two things together, I realized that I was seeing two dimensions of a legacy,” he said. “And that was the story. Between impact and inheritance lies the thread that gives us the meaning.” That thread, he added, was why Yvette completed the panel as its third pillar—the voice of memory, meaning, and continuity.
Jean Shafiroff—prominent philanthropist, humanitarian, television host, and author of Successful Philanthropy: How to Make a Life by What You Give, widely dubbed the “First Lady of Philanthropy”—reminded the audience that legacy is not something we build only at the end of a life.
“Every day, we start our legacy,” she said. “In my book, I write at the very end that no one really will remember us for the business we founded or the work we did. They’ll remember us by what we give back.” Her message to the room was direct: “Get it down on paper… so that your children and your grandchildren can learn from you and be proud of who you were.”
Sebastian Clarke—appraiser, auctioneer, and managing director at Heritage Auctions, with some twenty-five years of experience in the industry—spoke to the fragile relationship between objects and the stories that give them meaning.
“My day job is with objects great and small, and we are in the midst of the greatest transfer of wealth between generations,” he said. “The reality is that most of it will be mishandled. These are objects that will be lost to the sands of time without that historical documentation.” He illustrated the point with a crew member’s pocket watch from the Titanic—a modest gold watch worth little in itself, yet, with its provenance documented, one of the most significant pieces of maritime history to come to market.
Yvette Conn brought the conversation back to the heart of what LifeBook does. For her, “story is everything,” and the danger is that, left unwritten, stories become eroded, changed, and lost and can even turn divisive within families who never learned the full context behind a decision.
“It is the story that lives on, as Sebastian and Jean explained so well,” she said. “It keeps everything going. Sharing that story is absolutely critical. We need to capture it in order that future generations can follow on the work that is so important.”
It is precisely that thread between impact and inheritance that LifeBook Memoirs exists to preserve.
