What's Your History?

The What's Your History? Project is an effort to reunite names to faces and voices found in portraits and items, primarily from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that have been lost with time. The focus of the project is not on the wealthy or well-known people of the past, but average individuals, like many of our ancestors, whose stories have often been forgotten. The project identifies, digitally documents, and preserves portrait photographs dating from 1839-1919, as well as other artifacts associated with named individuals from throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What’s Your History? maintains and actively adds to a large and growing permanent collection of its own, while also incorporating photographs and items from other museum, archival, and private collections into its digital records that can be used as a powerful tool for any historical or genealogical research.