As a byproduct of wandering southern Indiana, I’ve taken several shallow dives into the history of people whose names I’ve found in cemeteries, or the counties I’ve explored, and it’s addictive.

There are so many interesting stories out there, from the attorney general who summed up the evidence presented at a trial as “the victim lynched himself and his fellow thieves in jail” to the couple with 6 male children who named each successive pair of boys using the same initials (e.g. Carl Ervin, Carwin Earl; Truman William, Tresman Walter; Llewellyn Purcell, Lealyn Percy).

The resources that are already available are amazing (one woman, Violet Toph, assembled thousands of pages of memories and genealogy records for her county in the mid-20th century) but obviously very incomplete. Your idea would be a terrific way to help fill in some of those gaps and encourage people to keep their own memoirs somewhere outside Facebook.