Website Information - Our Story - Ourstory.com

Do you want to preserve your memories, and those of your friends and family, on-line for your children and grandchildren? Ourstory.com allows you to do just that, for free. Even if you are looking for a unique on-line journal in which to record the events of your life, Ourstory.com has something to offer. By combining social networking with on-line journaling, photo hosting, and a unique set of questions, Ourstory.com can be tailored for many uses. It isn't just to be used to record family history.

The intention for Ourstory.com is that once you sign up for the free account, you will begin recording your memories. Then, you can invite friends and family to join as well. By connecting your accounts and changing a few settings, you can allow friends and family to add to your recollection of certain events. In this on-going project, you will be left with a true living family history. You also have the ability to include as many pictures as you'd like, which help to illustrate events. You can even use icons, free use pictures, and more, making the entire project that much more interesting.

As Ourstory.com developed, people began to realize its true potential. The website can be used for much more than just family history. You can use it to keep a private or public journal, connect to a new group of on-line friends (the Our Story community is very friendly), memorialize a beloved friend or family member who passed away, or it can be used as an on-line baby book for your child. If you are interested, you can even use it to create your own baby book of sorts; one that extends across your entire life.

When used as a journal, Ourstory.com has some advantages over websites such as Livejournal.com. First of all, you can see all of your entries in timeline form with pictures. If you take care to include a picture with each entry, you will have a visual representation of each entry on your timeline. In addition, if you later choose to use it to record family history, or just your personal history, the tools are right there. If you were so inclined, you could create one account that was a personal journal and another that records the events of your life. Then, once you've told your friends and family about the website, you can connect them all and both of your accounts will add to your family history project. Our Story has a special feature that helps people remember the events of their lives that they may have forgotten long ago.

One of the most unique features of Ourstory.com is the questions feature. While your Our Story account comes with a series of questions regarding your childhood, your high school years, and various segments of your adult life, you can also send custom questions to yourself or to people in your personal network (you can also categorize various people in your network into friends, family, or create custom categories). You don't need to answer any of the questions, but they help you remember long forgotten incidents from your childhood and any era of your life. When you answer them (and try to date them), they become part of your story, and once your family and friends add their own information, it becomes part of their story too.

If you have any interest at all in preserving your family history or recording the events of your life, Our Story is a great way to begin the process. Since it went out of Beta a couple of months ago, it has become much easier to use. If you really want to expand on its capabilities, you can pay for a premium account. There isn't anything else quite like it on-line.