Kirriemuir, Angus · Est. 2025
Still Here began with a trip to Register House in Edinburgh, a reel of microfiche, and the realisation that the archive existed — but the person didn't.
The beginning
It started with a request. A mother asking her son to look into the family history. A journey to Register House in Edinburgh — Scotland's national archive — and the experience that almost everyone who has done this knows: names on records, dates on certificates, scratchy handwriting on microfiche.
The archive was there. Everything official that needed to exist, existed. But there was no sense at all of who these people actually were. How they sounded. What they worried about. What their lives felt like from the inside.
That gap — between the record and the person — is what Still Here exists to close. Not for the past, which is gone. For the future, which isn't.
The realisation
In 100 years, your great-grandchildren will find a record of you. A name, a date, a document. They'll know you existed.
They won't know how you laughed. What you worried about at 3am. What this town looked and felt like when you were young. What you learned from your life that you never quite found the words to pass on.
Still Here is the attempt to change that — one conversation at a time, in living rooms and kitchens across Scotland, between the people who love each other most.
Why it matters
The generation who remember pre-digital Scotland — the farms, the mills, the dialects, the way of life before everything changed — are in their 70s and 80s now. The window is open.
Still Here is rooted in Kirriemuir, Angus. Small enough that the community is legible. Old enough that the urgency is real. Scottish enough to know that these voices matter — not just to the families who hold them, but to the country they helped build.
What exists
Still Here is not a concept in search of a product. It is a fully developed project — question packs, companion guide, consent framework, vault architecture, and institutional outreach — ready to pilot.
The long view
The Doomsday Book was a survey of England in 1086 — land, livestock, population, the texture of ordinary economic life. Historians have studied it for 900 years. It was commissioned by a king and recorded by clerks. It captured the people incidentally, as data points.
Still Here is a voluntary Doomsday Book. Made by the people it records. Capturing the things that official records never hold — voice, character, feeling, wisdom, the direct address to a great-grandchild not yet born.
One day each year, every year, for as long as the project runs. In 100 years, the accumulated archive will be cited the way we cite Mass Observation, the way we cite oral history projects that caught voices before they were lost. The difference is that Still Here will have video. And it will have been happening since 2026.
Get involved
Buy a kit and make the first recording. Bring Still Here to your school or community. Partner with us to build the archive. Or just tell someone who needs to hear about it.