The UnWritten

Throughout every continent and many cultures of our planet, personal photos have been saved. Your photos are windows to the stories that are your personal history. They may be in a box, a suitcase, or neatly placed in an album. Many of these photos may have a date or name on the back but there is probably nothing else written. Your family photos may have been taken last week or many decades ago. When a photo is shared the story may be told but not saved! Will anybody know why those photos were saved 100 years from now?

"The UnWritten" will lead you into a fascinating interactive educational quest. Working with one photo at a time, this quest will show you how to research, write, and save your photo-stories. A photo-story can be as simple as an informative caption, poem or short story, or as complete as a biography. It can include portions of a diary, notes, or a log. By exploring the windows of your past you will find some of the most exciting stories that are yet unwritten. Through old photos you can discover personal connections to world history along with fascinating love, horror, and mystery stories that link the past into your life. Participating in this quest will help you have a better understanding of who you are by exploring your past. Most photo-stories are unwritten and in great danger of being lost forever.

As the "The UnWritten" team our quest has only begun, yet it has already taken us back many decades through great adventures, horrid tragedies, ghost stories, and natural disasters which we will share as examples. During the search for our old family photo stories our team met our third team member through the web. We are three girls and all cousins, yet there are thousands of miles and over 100 years of family history between us. Who knows, maybe you too could find a lost cousin.

Getting Started:

Getting Started Introduction.

The Photo-Story Kit.

Start With A Photo.
Interviewing.

Clues:

Clues Introduction.
Beyond The Focus.
What Was The Date?

Clues Interview.

Treasures:

Treasures Introduction.
Journals, Diaries, & Letters. Genealogical Documents. Saving Your Work.

Lessons:

WebQuests :

Journey Through Time

Family Map

nnnLessons:

Family Names
Handwriting: Unlocking The Past
Memory Lane

Site Extras:

Links & Resources:
An index page of the recommended web and book resources linked throughout the site.

Message Board:
This is the place! Tell us about the lost stories you are searching for. Locate others researching your family history. Tell us your photo adventures! Leave comments or suggest a great resource for The UnWritten. Teachers, comment on what lessons work in your classrooms. If you haven't figured it out yet, we want to hear what you have to say. The Internet is all about communication, so let's communicate!

Our Stories:
Here you can learn about our mysterious Harrison family connection and how our photo-stories have hit a brick wall at our ancestor Benjamin R. Harrison. There is also a timeline index of all the photo-stories that are used in this site as examples.

Site Directory:
This is an index of every page of The UnWritten listed in order.

Contact Us:
Find out who authored the UnWritten and the different ways to e-mail us.

In the full interactive version the notes in the top menu will turn the music on or off.

This tree symbol next to a pop up window represents one of our family photo-stories.

Navigation:

The UnWritten is designed so you may explore the site in whatever direction you please. In the full interactive version the top flash menu will stay with you on each main page. By putting your mouse over the main topic links, you will have direct links to the sub topics of each section. You can also follow the arrows at the bottom of each page for a complete site tour.

At the bottom of every main page you will find:
......* Links to each of the four main sections.
......* Links to the Site Extras.
......* The navigational arrows that will take you through the full site tour.