My mother sent me to Register House in Edinburgh to look into the family history. I sat at a microfiche machine and found my ancestors — people who loved, worked, argued, grieved, raised children, built things, lost things — reduced to scratch marks on a screen. A name. A date. A parish. Nothing else.
The people themselves were gone. Not just dead — gone. There was no way back to them.
I sat with that for a long time. And then I started to think about what was different now.
From this point forward, anyone who thinks to act will leave something entirely different behind. Not scratch marks. Speech. Photographs. Video. A grandmother talking about what the street smelled like, what she wore to her first job, what she thought about when she was frightened. A grandfather explaining what he believed, what he regretted, what he was proud of. Living history — not a record of a person, but the person themselves, still present for whoever comes looking a hundred years from now.
That is what Still Here is for.
We are a living memory and genealogy platform. We help families record the testimonies that no official document was ever designed to keep — and build the archive that future generations will be grateful someone thought to make.