Story Guidelines

Introduction

We created this Gazetteer because we enjoy visiting and exploring the communities of the United States and Canada. We enjoy the things we find ‑ whether big or small. We enjoy history and how each community is unique.

With the travel comes people-watching, local newspapers and visiting with the people we meet. Sometimes we just sit with our coffee and listen to people talk about a fishing trip or the most recent trouble with their tractor. We hear the stories from their youth or the stories told by their parents and family. Some stories are funny, some sad. Some hint at scandal. You can believe some and others, well ‑ they're fun too.

All too often, the stories are only known locally. I'm not talking about outright gossip or the stories that are mean-spirited or vindictive, but the stories that truly define a community. For our Gazetteer, we're hoping to find stories that give an understanding of the community, its origin, the residents and what it was like to live there.

While many stories are about people, we really want to focus on stories about the community. With that in mind, we are limited in what we can include and really hate the idea that anybody might spend time preparing a story that we can't use. We've created the following Guidelines to help give you a feel for the kinds of stories that we're looking for.

Just as an example, I've created a couple of stories to see how this new section looks:

Bishop, California

Road Ends, California

If you have a story, we hope that you'll share it with us.

Our Wishlist

We are primarily looking for stories that are fond and positive memories of your community. Given that we are a Gazetteer, we prefer stories about the community's past and not so much about individuals.

At the same time, we recognize that some people and businesses played significant roles in the community's history and they should be remembered as well. It's the past that formed the community of today and so it's the past that we hope to capture.

The memories and stories of your community may be passed down person to person. Some might be found in journals, diaries, letters, etc. If you can date the story, please be sure to include it. If not, can you make a good guess?

Assume that the people who read your story have never visited your community. Even if they never visit, what impression do you want them to have of your community?

Obviously, not every memory is happy. There are floods, tornados, earthquakes and all the other disasters that temper a community. These stories are important and we would like to include them as well.

Do you have stories about the founding of your community? The how and why of your community's name? Has your community gone through name changes? Was it forced to move because of disaster?

Another aspect of the community was how people travelled to/from it. I have an interest in steam locomotives and I often think that the railroads deserve more recognition for their contributions to the growth and success of North America.

Keep in mind that it wasn't the railroads alone, there were ships, keel boats, stage coaches, trams, horseback, wagons and some people simply walked. These stories should also be remembered.

Don't forget the Post Office, they played a significant role in the founding of many communities and they shouldn't be forgotten either.

Many of the communities in our Gazetteer are gone (we use the term 'Historic') and are gradually being forgotten ‑ few remember anything about them. We would especially love to know more and hear their stories.

Some things that you should know

In doing our updates, we collect our changes and then apply them at one time. We do these updates every few months, so it can be many months from the time that we receive your story and the time that you are able to see it on the RoadsideThoughts website.

When we add a story, we put the most recent story first. We also provide an index by author when there are multiple stories.

We reserve the right to edit your story. We will probably need to do some editing to make the story fit on our website. We might fix some spelling, maybe some grammar ‑ but we want to keep it at a minimum. Coarse, inappropriate or inflamatory language will be removed.

With the size of our website, we frequently get overwhelmed and we can be really slow to answer our mail. We aren't some kind of large company ‑ it's just the two of us. With time we will do better, but it's an uphill battle. It's not fair that we depend on your patience, but we really do appreciate it. Thank you.

How to send us your story

Just write (or copy-paste) your story into an e-mail. It's best to write it as plain text ‑ formatting like bold, underline, italics, color and embedded pictures will be removed when it's placed on our website.

Please give us the community where we should place your story ‑ we have over 100,000 communities and there are a lot of duplicate names. We suggest that you find the community on RoadsideThoughts and then copy/paste the adddress (the URL) of its page for us.

Please give us your name as you would like it to appear with your story. To preserve your privacy, we remove all e-mail addresses. If you belong to something like a Historical or Genealogical Society, please give us the website or contact address if you would like it to be included with your story.

Since our 'Story' section is new, we haven't decided on the best way to handle things like maps, drawings and pictures. If you want to include one with your story, please contact us to see if we've made enough progress to be able to do it. We intend to have things like pictures, but it's still down the road.

When you're ready to send us your story, please send it through our Feedback Page.

When your story has been placed on RoadsideThoughts, we will send you a note to let you know where it can be found. Like I mentioned above, it might be a few days to several months before you hear from us. Once again, thank you for your patience.