Local Past
Every place has a story.
A shared archive of the people, places, and memories that make up your local history. Built by everyone who cares to add to it.
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What it is
Local history is scattered. Family history is disconnected.
The past leaves traces in parish registers, census returns, newspapers, court records, and gravestones. It also lives in the memories families keep about the places they came from. But all of these sit in different archives, websites, and people's notebooks, and they rarely connect.
Local history groups hold extraordinary knowledge about particular communities, but that knowledge rarely connects to the people who lived there.
Local Past brings them together. Add a burial record, and it shows up on the person's profile as well as on the church's place page. When someone else researches the same village, they find your work and can build on it.
Browse people and places
From a whole county down to a single house.
Share what you know
A photo, a transcription, an archive reference, or a memory. You don't have to be a historian.
Link it to real locations
Pin a memory to the church, the farm, or the corner where it happened.
Build on each other's research
See what other people working on the same area have added, and follow the places that matter to you.
How it works
Start with a place.
You don't need an account to look around. Read what others have added, browse the places you're interested in, see who's working on the same family. When you want to add to the community, sign up. It takes about a minute.
Find a place that matters to you
Search by town, parish, or address, or start at the country level and work down.
Add a memory or a record
It could be a paragraph about a building, a family story, a transcribed parish entry, or an archive reference. Anything you know that's worth keeping.
Connect it
Tag the people, places, and dates it mentions. Your record sits with theirs.
Who it's for
For everyone with a piece of the past.
No prior research experience needed. Some of the best contributions come from people who just remember something.
Curious about a place
You've wondered what your street looked like a hundred years ago, who used to live in your house, or where that old mill used to stand.
Researching a family
Tracing the people you came from and the places they lived.
Local history groups
Working together on a shared record of a parish, village, or town.
Students, historians, writers
Using local records and local knowledge in academic or creative work.
Built for research
Records of the past, treated with care.
Local Past is a record of past lives, past places, and past events. It's not a directory of living people, and we will never sell or share private information about anyone alive today.
Anything you contribute is yours: edit it or take it down whenever you want.
Photos download with a small attribution band so your work travels with credit. Reports of inaccurate or sensitive content are handled by a small moderation team, not an algorithm.
Ready to start?
Have a look around to see what's already here, or create an account when you're ready to add a memory or a record.