Introduction

In 2012, Roots and Recall.com, was unveiled for the first time in Chester County S.C. Chosen in part due to their extensive collection of photography but also because of their great historic architecture, Chester has many opportunities to explore and share their roots and recall their past. We hope Roots and Recall can bring this same level of excitement to your corner of America and help you recall your special place in time.

The mobility of modern life has undermined the ability to share family stories, yet the desire to record and preserve community, genealogical and family ties remains strong. RootsandRecall.com recognizes that technology offers the means to reverse this trend. By sharing our recollections, images, and stories, we can help preserve a place in time for each community while building our own family history sites. Through using RootsandRecall.com, we can learn how our individual family history is threaded into the fabric of the economic and social history of our past. Viewing an image of granddaddy's home for the first time and being able to see the changes in his home over time can bring life to the family we never knew. Seeing granddad's home on a Sanborn Insurance Map and his occupation listed in a city directory provides a strong understanding of who he was and where we came from. This technology allows the user to share and thus preserve photographs and information and make it available to relatives virtually anywhere in the world. As one user shared, "I live in California and this is the first time I have ever seen my great grandparent's home in South Carolina. Thank you!"

Families continue to relocate and all too often, photographs, journals, and letters are destroyed. We urge RootsandRecall.com users to place images and stories on the website so they can be preserved and shared. Often people don't have the means to store the physical records, so we urge that they be donated to a local archive, library, or museum. RootsandRecall.com works diligently with archives and museums to facilitate the preservation of and use of these materials. RootsandRecall.com's founders, staff, and contributors are routinely involved in historic preservation. Our goal is to work in conjunction with local professionals to enhance their ability to share information in the hope that the public will reciprocate. For that reason, images offered on rootsandrecall.com may not be copied and urge uses to refrain from illegal reproductions of the website materials.