Bring What You Have

A correction

A date, a name, a spelling, a credit: if a record here has it wrong, the record wants to know. A correction prints on the record itself, beside the fact, with its source; nothing is quietly swapped.

A name, a date, or a place the index is missing

The gaps in this record print as gaps, and some of them are gaps only the town can close: a name your family holds, a date written on the back of a photograph, a place the record has not gathered yet. Bringing it is how the thin places thicken.

A photograph or a scan

A picture of a record: a cannery crew, a crew list, a program, a letter, a storefront. Send word of the picture and what you know of it: whose it was, when it was made, and where it has been kept.

A memory tied to a record

What it was like: the ferry in a blow, the hall on a Saturday, the cannery whistle at dawn. A memory stands in the record as a memory, labeled as told, never dressed as a document, with the teller's name as the teller gives it.

A transcription

The town's papers stand free at their own archives, page by page, and most of their words have never been typed. A page read carefully and typed out, sent with the paper's name and its date, joins the record the way the 1906 front page's reading stands with the page in the walk's fourth gallery.

How it works

Everything sent here is read by the person who keeps the Archive. Nothing joins the record on a sender's word alone, or on ours: a contribution is checked against the sources first, the way every record here was checked, and a date is printed only at the precision its evidence supports.

Say how you would like to be credited, or say not to be named at all; either is honored, exactly as given. Your mail address is used to answer you, and for nothing else. Nothing here is sold, ever, and nobody pays, or is paid, for a place in this record.

You keep your rights in anything you send. By sending a photograph or a text, you give the Archive leave to show it here, with your credit line. Send only what is yours to share, and please do not send private records about living people.

Why there is no comments board

There is no board here for the public to write on, and the reason is plain: this Archive is kept by one pair of hands, and a public board needs watching every day. An unwatched board would fill with noise, and worse, under records that deserve quieter company. So this page is the way instead: slower, read by a person, and answered.