A coastal town · Summer, 1968
The screen door
at the end of the lane
“We measured the summer in how many times someone called us in for supper.”
A beginning, not a finished archive
A whole life.
One story
at a time.
The everyday things. The extraordinary things.
The things only you remember.
A place to keep the stories of a life, in the words of the person who lived it.
Start with a memory Try it without an account.
From the story notebook№ 001
“I can still hear
the screen door
closing behind us.”
A place that felt like homeFictional example
History lives in the details.
In your own wordsA question to get startedNothing public by accident
01 / The idea
Some of our most
important history
never gets written.
The way a neighborhood used to look. Your first day at work. A family recipe that was never really a recipe.
Primarysources begins with a simple question and a little room to remember. The ambition is a living archive of first-hand history, shaped by the people telling it.
Today’s prototype is a written story notebook. Voice recording, transcription and a public archive are on the drawing board.
02 / A few possible beginnings
Small moments.
Whole worlds.
Fictional stories to show the idea.
No real people or archive recordings.
The screen door
A small print shop · The 1970s
The first thing
I ever made
“The letters were backwards in my hand. On the page, everything made sense.”
A family kitchen · Every Sunday
A recipe
without measurements
“A handful meant her handful. We were all trying to learn what that looked like.”
03 / Start where you are
You don’t need
to remember everything.
- 01
Find one thread
A place, a person, a day. Pick a question that brings something back.
- 02
Tell it your way
Write a few lines or a whole chapter. You can always come back to it.
- 03
Keep the choice yours
The demo stays in your browser. The saved notebook stays within the project workspace. Neither publishes stories.
There is a story only you can tell.
What do you
remember?
Try the story notebook Writing works today. Recording comes later.
Inside this first prototype
Explore fictional stories and save a written draft in your browser without signing in. The saved project notebook is available to invited collaborators through Redgold. It keeps drafts within the shared project workspace; separate family accounts are future work.
Open the saved project notebook ↗