About

The Mission

Land Story exists to break the cycle of the loss of history that often occurs when real estate changes ownership. Rarely do the previous owners of a house or the land it sits on pass on their stories to the future owners or next generations. Sometimes there isn't enough time to record the stories, and sometimes telling stories isn't a priority as we navigate our busy lives. Land Story solves this problem by compiling the stories for you into a document that can be shared easily with others.

Who is Behind Land Story?

Hi there, my name is Sean, and I started Land Story as an outgrowth of my other project called Solguud. Solguud is a history YouTube channel that I started to document forgotten places, primarily ancient Native American settlements starting around Philadelphia and then expanding from there. You see, growing up in Delco PA, we weren't really taught too much about the Lenape Indians who lived there for thousands of years. I don't think many of us learn much about the ancient history of our landscape in school.

The amazing thing is that a lot of native sites still exist out in the woods, or behind parking lots, or in the brush under a highway overpass. The fact is that there are many ancient places all over the US that none of the locals really know about. So I decided to take matters into my own hands and create a Youtube channel to visit these ancient places and learn about and spread the history of our landscape that we were never taught. 

Along the way of making videos for Solguud, I realized that one of the main reasons that we never learned about these ancient places growing up is that they weren't properly documented when colonists moved onto the land previously occupied by Native Americans. Especially on the East Coast, where groups like the Lenape lived, there isn't much information left about where their villages were, even though we know there were villages everywhere across the landscape.

That means that often, when developers build new houses, they are building houses on land that had been occupied for thousands of years and they don't even know it. It is not an exaggeration to say that the house you live in right now could be where many generations of people were born, lived, and died in prehistoric times.

Wouldn't you like to know if that's the case? Remembering the people who came before us, even if all we know about them is where they lived, is important to all of us as Americans and as humans. Being remembered is a natural human value, and remembering the people who came before us gives our own lives a broader context. I want to help you discover that forgotten history under your home so that we can all benefit from remembering the stories of the land.

Why I Started Land Story

With millions of homes in the USA, I realized I needed to start a new project to accommodate this broader task. While my youtube channel Solguud is about ancient history around Philadelphia and the mid Atlantic region, but there is so much other history also worth saving and discovering in our homes. Who was 'Amy' and why did she carve her name into the wonky shelf in the basement? Which 1960's catalogue did the tile in the upstairs bathroom come from? What did the neighborhood look like before the house was built? Solguud is not the right platform to answer these questions. So I started Land Story as a place to tell both the ancient and modern history of the places we call home.

There is another more pressing reason for starting Land Story: there are hundreds of thousands of homes for sale right now across the US, and all of them represent transfers of ownership that will likely lead to the loss of history. I have to act now to interrupt this destruction, and I have to act at scale to stem the losses and save what can be saved before more stories are lost to time.

Will you join me on this quest?

Land Story is a mission driven business. I created Land Story because, like you, I care deeply about our history and our past. I love imagining the the Native Americans hunting in the ancient forest that is now the backyard, the colonial settlers making camp under the stars where the living room now sits, and the Irish farmer who tilled the land the garage now sits on while his sons fought for freedom during the Civil War. These are stories that make us who we are and we should remember them. Will you join me in this quest to preserve the history of our land? I sure hope you do.

Sincerely,

Sean