MEMORY MAPPING
OTOWN
A descendant-led archival storytelling initiative
Begin your Memory Map
As a Narrative Archivist and creative researcher, my work explores the relationship between memory, place, migration, and family history through archival storytelling, oral history, and digital mapping.
OTOWN Memory Mapping grew from my own family research and descendant-centered archival practice. Through this project, I collaborate with individuals, families, and communities to preserve stories that often exist beyond traditional archives — stories carried through photographs, oral histories, migration routes, cultural memory, and lived experience.
Submit an intake form to begin contributing and/or collaborating with the OTOWN archive.
What is Memory Mapping?
I look at Memory Mapping as the process of documenting the people, places, stories, migrations, and lived experiences that shape a family or community history. It is a love effort to curate a recovery archive that tell the history we were born into.
What can you share?
Family Names –– surname histories, pronunciations, elders
Places –– homes, neighborhoods, churches, beaches, schools
Oral Histories –– stories, sayings, migration memories
Documents –– photos, letters, obituaries, recordings
Cultural Memory –– recipes, traditions, music, old sayings...etc.
Tell us a Story...
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What story in your family should never be forgotten?
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What place shaped your people?
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What name carries history?
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What memory still lives in your family?
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What road, church, kitchen, or shoreline matters to your lineage?
Featured Stories
Work in Progress...
Short excerpts from submissions.
Migrations
Work in Progress...
Timelines, Movement Routes...etc.
Historiopoetics
an archival conversation
I crafted historiopoetics to showcase, teach, and examine — the conditional relationships between poetry and time — I am most interested in,
how writers produced freedom, memory, and history through articulation.