Historical Deposit
Your words, kept for people you will never meet.
One day, someone not yet born may want to know who you were, how you lived and what you thought about your own time. A Historical Deposit is how your record can reach them: it gives your first-hand account a home with a library or archive, beyond your family and beyond us.
A voice from your own time
History is often written about people, years later, by someone else. Your record is different: it is your life in your own dated words, as you saw it while you lived it. Archivists call this a first-hand account, and it is exactly the kind of source they hope to find. Every person is irreplaceable, and so is the way you see the world today.
For descendants not yet born
Your great-great-grandchildren may never hear your name from someone who knew you. With a Historical Deposit, they could still read what you valued and why, in your words rather than a summary of them. A library or archive gives them a place to look, generations from now.
For historians, genealogists and researchers
Ordinary lives, told by the people who lived them, are how we come to understand a time: how families worked, what people worried about and what they hoped for. Historians, genealogists, students and other researchers look for exactly this. Your record could help someone, decades from now, understand ours.
What a library or archive does
Libraries and archives take in personal papers and look after them. They usually describe and catalog a collection so it can be found, and let people read it under their own rules, which may keep some or all of it closed for a time, for example to protect people still living. Each one decides for itself how it keeps and shares what it receives.
The path that reaches further
The people you name each receive their own copy of your record, and with Archive Membership they can use the guide while their time with it lasts. The guide is only for them: no one is added after them, so it ends when their time with it ends. Copies in a family can be kept for many years, and they can also be lost along the way. A Historical Deposit is the path that does not depend on any one person, or on us, to carry your words forward.
Always your choice
A Historical Deposit is optional, and nothing is ever chosen for you. We explain it when you set up Archive Membership and at each yearly review, and "Not now" is always as easy as yes. There is no deadline, and while you are living you can withdraw it in Settings. Nothing in your record is made public while you are living.
How it works, in brief
It is a one-time add-on to Archive Membership, available once your paid Archive Membership has begun. You sign a deed of gift, the standard agreement libraries and archives use. When your record leaves ToldForward after your passing, once the people you name have their copies and the guide has ended, we send a copy, with your deed of gift, to one of our partner libraries or archives for your state. We promise that one of them will receive it, not which one. We are confirming our partners now, and the Historical Deposit is not offered in Florida, Virginia, or Indiana for now.
Price, refunds and the full detailsYour life, in your own words, is part of history.
Families grow and move, and technology changes. Libraries and archives are built to look after people's papers for the future. If you would like your first-hand account to be there for the generations after us, a Historical Deposit is how.