The facts at a glance
| What it is | A personal memory map |
|---|---|
| What it is not | A travel tracker, a trip planner or a social network |
| What a pin holds | A written story, one photo and a date (any day from 1900) |
| Location-locked stories | Any story can be marked "Only readable at this place," so readers must be within about 200 meters of the pin to open it |
| Views | A map, and a journal grouped by year |
| Sharing | Private by default; invite people by email, or switch on a public link. Readers can't edit. |
| Price | Free |
| Where it runs | In the web browser on phones, tablets and computers |
| Launched | November 2026 |
| Website | heremystory.com |
| The map itself | app.heremystory.com |
| Contact | hello@heremystory.com |
Why does it exist?
Most of what a family knows about itself is attached to places. The house on the corner. The store Grandpa ran. The field behind the school. The stories get told when someone drives past, and they are lost when the last person who knows them stops driving past.
Map apps were not built for this. They track trips, count countries and sort the photos on a phone. They have no place for a memory from 1962 that has no photograph, in a town nobody in the family lives in any more.
Here My Story is a small tool for that one job: put a pin on the spot, write what happened, add the date, and let the family read it.
What does the name mean?
Here, as in this place. Here is where my story happened. It is sometimes misheard as "Hear My Story," which is a different phrase and the name of unrelated organizations. The website is heremystory.com.
Why an elephant?
"An elephant never forgets" is a long-established saying, and there is evidence that elephants have a remarkable memory for places.
Researchers tracking elephants by GPS in Etosha National Park, Namibia, found that they head for water in fast, nearly straight lines from as far as about 50 kilometers away, choosing the nearest waterhole nine times in ten (Polansky, Kilian and Wittemyer, 2015). In Tanzania's severe drought of 1993, elephant families that left Tarangire National Park lost far fewer calves than those that stayed. The groups that left were the only ones with females old enough to have lived through the drought of 1958 to 1961, and the researchers suggest those elders may have remembered where to go (Foley, Pettorelli and Foley, 2008).
An animal that carries its family's knowledge of places suits a memory map.
What is it built on?
- Your map is private until you say otherwise. How privacy works
- Only you can change it. The people you share with can read and nothing more.
- The words come first. A pin is for a story. A photo is welcome, and optional.
- The place is part of the story. Which is why a story can be set to open only where it happened.
Sources
- Polansky, L., Kilian, W., & Wittemyer, G. (2015). Elucidating the significance of spatial memory on movement decisions by African savannah elephants using state–space models. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 282(1805), 20143042. doi:10.1098/rspb.2014.3042
- Foley, C., Pettorelli, N., & Foley, L. (2008). Severe drought and calf survival in elephants. Biology Letters, 4(5), 541–544. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2008.0370