Keep Atlanta’s local history online, findable and ours
History Underfoot is starting a coalition of Atlanta-area historical societies, neighborhood history groups and preservation organizations. The idea is to share the technical work, so small groups can keep their research online, easy to find and under their own control.
Why now
A great deal of Atlanta's neighborhood history lives on websites that volunteers built years ago and keep running on their own time. When a domain lapses, a hosting plan changes or the one person with the password moves on, years of research can go dark overnight.
Meanwhile, more people meet history through search engines and AI assistants. Those tools favor pages that are well structured, clearly sourced and easy to read, so careful local research is often the hardest for them to find, and answers about our neighborhoods get built from thinner sources.
What members get
- A rebuilt website, free: fast, mobile-friendly and simple for volunteers to update. Your organization keeps the domain, the content and every account.
- A rescue copy of what you have now. Pages, photos, newsletters and PDFs saved in open formats and handed back to you, with public pages also preserved in the Internet Archive.
- Findability. Clean page structure, sitemaps and structured data, so search engines and AI assistants can find your work and credit you by name.
- Your sources, visible. Citations on every page, and a license you choose.
- A place on the map. Your stories and places can appear on the Atlanta map, linked back to your own site.
Principles
- Your content stays yours. No ads, no selling data, no lock-in. You can take everything elsewhere at any time.
- Sources on every claim, and corrections welcome.
- AI is used in the open. It helps with research and building, people decide what is published, and every site says how it was made.
- Some places stay private. No locations of archaeological sites or graves, and no advice on digging or collecting.
Who can join
Historical societies, neighborhood history committees, cemetery and preservation groups, libraries and archives in the City of Atlanta, DeKalb County and nearby. Founding members will be listed here once they have agreed to it.
How to take part
Write to hello@historyunderfoot.org. A first conversation takes about half an hour: what you have, what you want to keep, and what would help. It costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Questions
Is this part of an existing institution? No. History Underfoot is an independent volunteer effort, and established institutions are welcome to take part.
Who pays for hosting? Most society sites fit within free hosting tiers. If anything would cost money, you will know before it is set up, and the bill stays in your name.
What happens to our current site? Nothing changes until you decide. The first step is a full backup that you keep.