A family contacts list nobody else keeps.
Your address book is a social graph. The default place it lives is a social-graph company.
Every cloud address book is also a marketing signal. For the household's important people — school, doctor, neighbour with the spare key, the emergency phone tree — an offline file is a saner container.
The people the phone address book forgets
The neighbour, the babysitter, the plumber you'd re-hire, the specialist the GP referred to. Kept where you'll find them, without merging into a synced-cloud phone-graph.
For the phone tree
The emergency phone tree is who to call, in what order. It belongs in one file, printed, on the fridge.
The people worth calling more often
The Keep-in-Touch tool tracks the cadence of your friendships — so the ones that matter don't slip through six months at a time.
What to reach for
Common questions
Import from Google Contacts?
Google exports vCard / CSV; import the ones that matter. Not the 2,300 auto-added ones.
Sync to phone?
Save the file to your phone; it opens in Safari or Chrome. Sync is what caused the problem — deliberately not adding it back.
WhatsApp?
WhatsApp will still have its own address book. Use both; the file is the family's primary.
Shared with partner?
Yes — put the file in a shared folder.