About

About

Time Travel Guides: About

How the Site Began

Time Travel Guides began because I somehow had a lot more time on my hands than I expected to during 2020. I spent a lot of that time reading about local history and learning some (very) basic programming and database skills online. I wanted to use these new skills to create something that would be both useful and enjoyable.

Being stuck in the house for a long time, I imagined a map that could not only take me to another place, but also to a different time. I decided to gather some of the interesting local history resources and stories I had come across and bring them together in a new experience to share with other people.

I chose Shrewsbury as the first location for TTGs because I live here. I hope that some of you will enjoy seeing the old streets in a new way or exploring Shrewsbury for the first time, from any distance.

What Are Time Travel Guides?

Time Travel Guides are maps that bring together historical data for small local areas. You can browse through the data or search for a specific person or place on the website. You can also use the tags or categories to find connections between the data. However, the best way to enjoy these guides is to visit the map page and wander around the location. You will see lots of information about who lived in the area and what it would have been like to walk through it in the past. You can control how far back in time you travel to see data from different periods.

You can use these guides to learn more about the history of your local area, to take a tour through time when you are visiting, or to explore places that you will never see in person. The first location for Time Travel Guides is the town centre of Shrewsbury, but I hope to add more destinations and more data from different time periods in the future.

Aims for TTGs

Time Travel Guides was created as a useful resource for local and family historians and as an imaginative experience for anyone who wants to visit the past.

I want TTGs to be:

  1. Open – making historical information easier for everybody to find and use
  2. Objective – presenting stories from the past without turning them into fiction
  3. Local – focusing on small areas and the communities and individuals in them

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