Terms of Use

1. Acceptance

These Terms of Use (“Terms”) govern your access to and use of Places We Remember (the “Service”), a service operated by Ancestor Maps, LLC (“Ancestor Maps,” “we,” “us,” or “our”).

By creating an account, accessing member features, or submitting content, you agree to these Terms and to our Community Guidelines. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal information. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

2. Service availability and changes

Places We Remember may add, remove, or modify functionality over time. We may also pause or limit access when reasonably necessary for maintenance, security, legal compliance, moderation, or operation of the Service.

3. Eligibility and age

You must be at least 18 years old to create a member account or use member features that require an account.

By creating an account, you represent that you are at least 18. We do not collect a date of birth. Guests may use certain public features (such as browsing published places or submitting a photograph-rights concern through the public rights form) without an account, but those features remain subject to these Terms and applicable law where they apply.

4. Accounts and security

You are responsible for:

• providing accurate account information you control;
• keeping your login credentials confidential; and
• activity that occurs under your account.

Notify us at support@placesweremember.com if you believe your account has been compromised. We may require email verification before certain contributions are allowed.

Account standing may include states such as active, suspended, or closed. Suspension can prevent new contributions while still allowing some account access. Closure can block ordinary member access. Legitimate prior contributions are not automatically erased solely because an account is suspended.

5. The Service

Places We Remember is a community-oriented local-history and place-memory service. Users may browse published places and related content, and eligible members may contribute information such as places, suggested updates, memories, replies, photographs, and reports, subject to review and these Terms.

The Service is informational and community-generated. It is not a government archive, official historical society, professional surveying service, legal advice service, or emergency service.

6. User contributions

6.1 What you may submit

Depending on available features and your eligibility, you may submit content including place information, suggested updates, memories, replies, photographs and related captions or attribution, reports about content, and other materials we expressly permit.

6.2 Your responsibilities

You are responsible for the content you submit. You represent that:

• you submit information in good faith and do not knowingly provide false or misleading material;
• you have the rights and permissions needed to submit the content, or another lawful basis that permits the uses described in these Terms;
• your content does not unlawfully infringe others’ rights (including copyright, privacy, publicity, or trademark rights);
• your content does not violate these Terms or the Community Guidelines; and
• you will not attempt to bypass moderation, eligibility, or security controls.

Place submissions and suggested updates are governed by these Terms and the Community Guidelines. Provide accurate information and useful sourcing when you can. Submissions may be reviewed, delayed, accepted, declined, or otherwise moderated.

6.3 Ownership and license

You retain whatever ownership rights you already have in content you submit. These Terms do not transfer copyright ownership to Ancestor Maps, LLC.

A. Public contributions you own or control

To the extent you own or control rights in content you submit for contribution or publication on Places We Remember (including place information, suggested updates, memories, replies, photographs, captions, and attribution you provide), you grant Ancestor Maps, LLC a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable (in connection with operating, selling, or reorganizing the Service or related business) license to:

• host, store, reproduce, copy, process, resize, reformat, and adapt for technical or presentation purposes;
• display, publicly display, distribute, publish, republish, and communicate;
• create service or presentation derivatives as reasonably needed to operate and present the Service;
• moderate, preserve, and secure; and
• promote, advertise, and market Places We Remember,

using that content in connection with operating, securing, moderating, improving, developing, presenting, marketing, advertising, and promoting Places We Remember.

This includes, for example, public site display, social-media promotion, promotional screenshots, marketing imagery, advertisements for Places We Remember, and other Places We Remember promotional contexts.

The license granted for public contributions is perpetual and irrevocable to the extent permitted by applicable law, including after a contribution is removed from public display or your account is suspended or closed. This does not require Places We Remember to continue publicly displaying the contribution. Where applicable law gives you rights that cannot be waived or requires us to honor a valid deletion, withdrawal, privacy, or similar request, those legal requirements control.

B. Public-domain, permissioned, licensed, or other lawful-basis material

Not every submission is content you personally own. For material that is public domain, submitted with permission, licensed, archival, or otherwise submitted under a lawful basis, you represent that the basis on which you submit it permits Places We Remember to make the uses reasonably described in these Terms (including public display and Places We Remember promotional/marketing use where that basis allows).

For public-domain material, you do not claim personal copyright ownership merely by uploading.

If you do not have a lawful basis that permits those uses, do not submit the material.

C. Reports, rights claims, and Support communications

Content reports, formal photograph-rights concerns, and private Support communications are not licensed for advertising or promotional use merely because they were submitted.

We may store, copy, review, and share those materials internally and with service providers as reasonably necessary to receive, investigate, administer, secure, respond to, preserve, and audit the request or communication.

D. Attribution

Where you provide attribution or source information with a public contribution, we may display it with the content as part of normal presentation.

6.4 Photographs

Photographs have additional practical rules in the Photo Submission Guidelines. In short:

• submit photographs only when you created them, have permission, they are public domain, or you otherwise have a lawful basis that permits the uses described in these Terms;
• public processed derivatives (such as gallery images) may be shown publicly after publication;
• private original or full-resolution processing copies are not exposed on public place pages;
• photographs may be moderated, hidden, archived, or removed; and
• removing a photograph from public view may delete public derivatives asynchronously while private copies may still be retained for operational, moderation, audit, or dispute-handling reasons under current technical behavior.

Ordinary “Report this photo” and formal “Copyright / rights concern” are different processes (see Section 9).

7. Prohibited conduct

You may not:

• harass, threaten, abuse, or target people;
• submit spam, scams, or deceptive promotional material;
• upload malware or attempt to disrupt or probe the Service;
• scrape or harvest data in a way that burdens or circumvents the Service;
• impersonate others or misrepresent your affiliation;
• submit unlawful, infringing, or knowingly harmful material;
• attempt to circumvent account standing, eligibility, verification, or security controls; or
• use the Service in violation of applicable law.

8. Moderation and reporting

We may review, delay, accept, decline, hide, archive, remove, or otherwise moderate content. We may act on reports, rights concerns, automated signals, or our own review.

Content reports (including “Report this place,” “Report this memory,” “Report this reply,” and “Report this photo”) allow eligible members to ask us to review content. Submitting a report does not automatically hide or remove the content. We may or may not take action, and we do not guarantee a particular outcome or response time.

Administrators may take content actions such as hiding, restoring, archiving, or removing published material according to the Service’s moderation tools.

9. Copyright and photograph-rights concerns

If you believe a published photograph raises a copyright or other photograph-rights concern, use the public Copyright / rights concern process at /rights (including deep links that prefill a photograph identifier when provided from a place page).

That formal process is separate from an ordinary member content report:

• the public form accepts one photograph per submission;
• you do not need a Places We Remember account;
• you must provide required information and make the required attestations;
• bot-resistance verification (Cloudflare Turnstile) may be required;
• submitting a concern does not automatically remove the photograph;
• we may review and, if appropriate, remove or otherwise act on the photograph through administrator workflows; and
• you may receive a reference code to keep for follow-up.

Follow-up is handled manually through Support using your reference code. Contact support@placesweremember.com and include the reference code. We may request additional information through Support.

We do not guarantee that any claim will result in removal or any other specific outcome, and we do not guarantee response times.

10. Availability and changes to the Service

We aim to keep the Service available, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted or error-free operation. Maintenance, outages, feature changes, and operational limits may occur.

11. Third-party services and links

The Service relies on third-party infrastructure such as hosting, authentication/database/storage providers, map tile providers, and bot-resistance services. Those providers have their own terms and practices. Map features may load map tiles from our map provider. If you choose browser geolocation on the map, your browser shares location with the application only for that action; Places We Remember does not currently save that location as a retained profile attribute.

Links to third-party sites are provided for convenience and are not endorsements.

12. Places We Remember intellectual property

The Places We Remember name, branding, site design, and software (excluding user content) are owned by Ancestor Maps, LLC or its licensors. These Terms do not grant you a right to copy or reuse our branding or software except as needed to use the Service as offered.

13. Suspension and closure

We may suspend or close accounts for violations of these Terms or the Community Guidelines, for security reasons, or as reasonably needed to operate the Service. Suspension and closure behaviors follow the Service’s account-standing model described in Section 4.

If you want to request account closure or discuss privacy-related account requests, contact support@placesweremember.com. The Service does not currently offer a full self-service account-deletion or data-export product.

14. Disclaimers

THE SERVICE AND ALL CONTENT ARE PROVIDED ON AN “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE” BASIS FOR INFORMATIONAL AND COMMUNITY PURPOSES. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, ANCESTOR MAPS, LLC AND PLACES WE REMEMBER DISCLAIM WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT CONTENT IS COMPLETE, CURRENT, OR ERROR-FREE, OR THAT THE SERVICE WILL MEET YOUR EXPECTATIONS.

User-generated local-history content may be incomplete, contested, or incorrect. Do not rely on the Service as the sole basis for legal, financial, safety, surveying, or emergency decisions.

15. Limitation of liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, ANCESTOR MAPS, LLC AND ITS OPERATORS WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOST PROFITS, DATA, OR GOODWILL, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE. OUR TOTAL LIABILITY FOR CLAIMS RELATING TO THE SERVICE IS LIMITED TO THE GREATER OF (A) THE AMOUNTS YOU PAID US FOR THE SERVICE IN THE TWELVE MONTHS BEFORE THE CLAIM (IF ANY) OR (B) USD $100.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations; in those cases, the limitations apply to the fullest extent permitted.

16. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. We may require acceptance of updated Terms before continued contribution. The effective date identifies the current version.

17. Contact

Ancestor Maps, LLC operates Places We Remember.

For questions about these Terms, account standing, content concerns, rights-claim follow-up, or privacy requests, contact:

support@placesweremember.com