The history of your street

Use with: build-website. Resume line when done: Researched and published a local history site from archival sources — live at {url}

Brief

What was on your street before your house? The answer exists, split between the library's local archive and the neighbor who has lived there for forty years. Gather both, and publish the history of one street: what stood where, when the houses went up, what changed. Every claim on the page needs a source you can name, which makes this a research project wearing a website.

Personalize

• The street. Yours, or a grandparent's if theirs has more history within reach.
• The long-term neighbor. Identify the person who has lived there longest and ask for an hour. Their memories are the material the archive does not have.
• The archive visit. Find where local records live near you: library local-history room, historical society, council records. Go in person and ask the librarian for help; they enjoy this.

Milestones

1. A page live at a URL, day one, with what you know unaided, which will be embarrassingly little.
2. Archive visit done; old maps, photos, or records copied with permission and filed with source notes.
3. Neighbor interview done and typed up.
4. The history written as a timeline or walk down the street, every claim tagged with its source.
5. Then-and-now: your photos of today next to whatever old images you found rights to use.
6. The neighbor reads it and corrects it. Final README with a full source list.

Done means

• Live URL responding; readable on a phone
• Every claim traceable to a listed source
• At least one archival source and one interview used
• Neighbor's corrections recorded in the README
• At least 8 commits across at least 5 distinct days, authored by you
• SESSIONS.md has an entry per session, written by you