Why This Exists
A few years ago, I stumbled across a photograph of the Great Salem Fire of 1914. It was taken from Gallows Hill, looking down at the smoke billowing across the city. I'd seen images of the fire before. It's famous, one of the worst urban fires in Massachusetts history. But this time, something caught my eye.
In the foreground, before the smoke, I could see a street. Houses. And then I realized: that was my street. That was my house. I was looking at my own home from over a century ago.
I must have stared at that photo for an hour. There's something uncanny about seeing a place you know intimately frozen in a moment from long before you existed. The trees are different, the cars are gone, the people are strangers. But the bones of the place are the same. You can almost feel time collapse.
That jolt of connection is what I wanted to make possible for others.
But the more I looked at the photograph, the more I noticed. Just below the high school on the hill sat a massive factory I'd never seen before. It wasn't there anymore. I walked that area all the time, and there was nothing like it. What was it?
After some digging, I discovered there was an enormous leather factory right where we used to play football and capture the flag. By the time I arrived on the scene in the late 70s, it was long gone.
That's when it hit me: every place has layers like this. Every street corner, every backyard, every building has a history that's invisible unless someone surfaces it. And those histories are scattered everywhere: in shoeboxes, attics, hard drives, library archives, old family albums. Waiting to be connected to the places they belong.
Think of it as a family tree for places. We build family trees to trace where we came from, to see the people who shaped us before we arrived. Places deserve the same.
Every yard sale has a box of photos nobody claims. Houses without addresses. Faces someone once loved. They've lost their connection to a family, to a place. This is a way to anchor them again.
If you're anything like me, you want to know what your street looked like before you were there. What your dad's house looked like when he lived there as a kid. What used to be on the corner where the pharmacy is now.
Somewhere, someone has photos of exactly those things. And somewhere, someone is wondering about the places in your photos. That's what we're building here.
If you have photos of places—your home, your street, your neighborhood, anywhere—I hope you'll consider adding them.