What goes on a memory map?
Each entry on a memory map has four parts.
- A place, marked as exactly as you can: the house, the corner, the bench.
- A story, usually a few sentences, about what happened there.
- A date, even if it is only a year.
- A photo, if one exists.
The places are mostly ordinary ones. A memory map of a whole life has more kitchens, classrooms and parking lots on it than landmarks, because that is where most of a life takes place.
Grandma's kitchen. The back door was never locked, and whoever came through it got fed. I did my homework at the end of the table nearest the stove.
The pay phone outside the laundromat. I called home from here every Sunday the first year I lived away, and hung up before the money ran out so nobody would hear me cry.
How is a memory map different from a travel map, a story map and a life map?
Several terms sound alike and mean different things.
| Term | What it is | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| Personal memory map | Real places from one person's or family's life, each with a story and a date | Keeping memories and sharing them with family |
| Travel map | Countries, cities and routes you have visited | Recording and showing trips |
| Story map | One narrative told through a sequence of map views, as in ArcGIS StoryMaps or StoryMapJS. In software design, "story mapping" is an unrelated planning technique. | Journalism, teaching and reports |
| Life map | A timeline of a life's high and low points, drawn as a line or path, with no geography | Coaching and counseling |
| Deep map | An intensive study of one small place from many angles. The term comes from William Least Heat-Moon's PrairyErth (a deep map), 1991. | Writing and scholarship about a place |
| Mental map or cognitive map | The picture of a place that a person carries in their head. Edward Tolman described cognitive maps in 1948, and Kevin Lynch studied how people picture cities in The Image of the City, 1960. | Psychology, geography and city planning |
| Memory palace | An imagined route used to memorize a list by placing each item at a spot along it | Memorizing |
| Memory map, in computing | The layout of a computer's memory addresses. Unrelated. | Hardware and software engineering |
Where does the idea come from?
Memoir teachers have used hand-drawn maps as a way into memory for decades. In Writing Life Stories, Bill Roorbach sets an exercise called Mapmaking: "Please make a map of the earliest neighborhood you can remember living in. Include as much detail as you can. Who lived where? What were the secret places?" (excerpt at Writer's Digest).
Schoolteachers use the same idea. In "Mapping Childhood" (Rethinking Schools, 2017), Linda Christensen describes students sketching their neighborhoods, marking where things happened and then writing those stories. Kathy G. Short's "Neighborhood Memory Maps" lesson at the University of Arizona follows a similar pattern: draw the map, label the stories, develop one in writing.
Behind the exercise is an old observation from geography. In Space and Place (1977), Yi-Fu Tuan argued that an anonymous space becomes a place as we get to know it and attach value to it. A memory map is a record of which spaces became places for you.
Why do memory maps work?
Places are effective cues for the memories of your own life. In a 2016 experiment by Robin, Wynn and Moscovitch, locations cued memories of events better than people did, and events remembered with a setting were recalled more vividly. Looking at a map of somewhere you once lived puts dozens of those cues in front of you at once. The research in more detail.
How do you make a memory map?
There are three common ways.
- On paper. Draw a neighborhood from memory and label what happened where. This is the classic exercise, and the quickest start.
- In a general mapping tool. Google My Maps lets you drop markers and write a description for each. It is flexible, though it was built for maps of places more than for stories. How My Maps compares.
- In a memory map app. Here My Story is a free personal memory map that runs in the web browser. Each pin holds a story, a photo and a date, and you can share the map privately with family.
Whichever you choose, the method is the same: list the places first, put them on the map, and write a few sentences for each. The step-by-step version is in how to make a map of your life.
What should you pin first?
- The first home you can remember
- Your route to school
- A grandparent's house
- The place you spent the most time at sixteen
- Your first job
- The first place you lived on your own
- Where you met the person who matters most to you
- A place that isn't there any more
- Where you were when you got important news
- The place you go to think
There are 100 more in the memory prompts by place.
Common questions
Is a memory map the same as a mind map?
No. A mind map is a diagram of ideas branching from a central topic. A memory map is geographic: real places on a real map, each with a memory attached.
What is the difference between a memory map and a story map?
A story map presents one narrative as a sequence of map views and is usually made for an audience, as in journalism or a class project. A personal memory map is a collection of separate memories from one life, each at its own place, and is usually private or shared with family.
What is a memory map app?
A memory map app lets you put a pin on a map and attach a memory to it, usually text and photos. They differ in whether pins are placed by hand or from photo location data, whether a memory can be dated in the past, and how the map is shared. Here My Story is a free one that runs in the browser, with hand-placed pins, dates back to 1900 and read-only sharing.