Add what you know

Maps record buildings. They do not record that the corner shop sold kerosene out of the back until 1961, or that your grandmother photographed the street before the highway went through. People do. That is the part of this archive that cannot be scraped from anywhere.

What we are collecting

• Photographs of houses and streets from family albums, with an address and a rough year.
• Recollections tied to an address — what was on the corner, who ran it, when it changed.
• Corrections and additions to a Sanborn sheet, where you know what a building actually was.
• Phase I ESA outcomes, anonymised — what the assessment cost, how long it took, and in general terms what it looked at. No property identifiers, no consultant names without their agreement.

The rules

• A person reads everything before it is published.
• We do not publish the names of living people, and we remove personal details on request.
• Only submit material you are allowed to share. Say where a photograph came from.
• Recollections are published as recollections, attributed to a first name or anonymous — never presented as an established fact about a property.
• Nothing contributed here changes what a document says. Where a memory and a map disagree, we show both.

Do you know something about Baltimore, Maryland?

Old photographs, what your family remembers being on the corner, a shop that is not on any map we have. Contributions are read by a person before anything is published, and we never publish the names of living people.

By sending this you confirm you may share the material, and you agree it can be published with your first name or anonymously. See contribution rules.

Send it in