Do you know the history of your own town/street/house? I went looking for mine today and realised that there's basically nothing. The place I spent my entire life at exists only in a few paragraphs on some bureaucratic papers and google maps schematic.
Your town probably has more history than you realize, things like "bureaucratic papers" just aren't going to go into much detail beyond the circumstances in which your town was founded. For example, what are the oldest buildings in your town? Because they probably have stories behind them. What about some of the street names? Because oftentimes even they have stories behind them. You just aren't looking hard enough.
>>18289282Shitass fishing village founded in the mid 19th century by people from Inland then blew up 100 yearss later into a tourist town.Built within my Grandparent's lifetimes to house Hotel industry employees.
>Area was a literal swamp which made development difficult>Late 1800s>Guy finds a small plot that he can actually do something with>Builds a church there and a small farm>Church is still there to this very day>Small village pops up around said church>Town is originally named after the guy that built the Church>Townsfolk eventually vote to change the name of the town to something else and incorporate>World War II comes around>Suburbs are built around the village>Population explodes>Most of the former-swamp is aggressively reclaimed for development with modern equipment
>>18289282This area was the local military strongpoint in indian times because it's on a bluff overlooking the river valleys. After Penn it was home to wealthy chiefs who did a great deal of trade with colonials. Then european immigrants moved in, but my street was a rambling country estate until the 19th century when they put in a railroad. The lack of history doesn't bother me, it still has an unrecorded past that lives on. It spent millions of years as a field and deer path, a couple hundred years of civilization can't erase that.
The house is old and some minor artists have slept here or whatever, doesn't really do much for me. More interested in whether any family lines go back to this area.
The map isn't the territory, and the documents aren't the layers.
>>18289292>>18289601This only has limited milleage. And more often than not all you are going to find is just provincial gossip extended for as long as documentation lasts. Punctuated by an ocassional eccentric.
>>18289616so what was your town before recorded history
>>18289282Brit here, mine was built on the grounds of a monastry, my house is where the orchard used to be. The street names around me reflect this My garden wall has been their since the 1200s. My council has records of every tenant who lived here since it was built - a school teacher, factory workers, shop owners, etc, as well as plans of the original grounds the house was built on in the 1800s. Give it a thousand more years or so, I am sure your place will have records as deep.
My “city” in the Detroit metro area has almost zero /his/. Native Americans to farms and logging in the 19th century, a railroad line with a flag stop but no real town center. Some auto plants and in the early 50s there was a massive fire that destroyed GM’s big transmission plant. Eddie Cicotte, ringleader of the Chicago Black Sox, had a strawberry farm after he was kicked out of baseball and is buried here. A Japanese fu-go balloon bomb landed nearby just outside the city limits. That’s about it.
