Which one makes it feel like a life is being discovered?

The map

Not a pin map. One line travelling across Britain, drawn as you scroll, with the legs evenly paced so no single leg swallows the journey. Only the place being reached is labelled: seven labels beside a map of Britain collide, because half a British life happens between Manchester and Essex. Past places stay as lit dots, and the complete list sits underneath in text.

Readability was the first thing fixed. On the old pale map the country vanished into the band behind it and carried no names at all. The coastline now does the defining, the way an etched map does, and every year, place and note is set in ink on paper beside the drawing, never on top of it. A is parchment land with a warm brown coast and a terracotta route; B is olive land with a darker olive coast and a burgundy route.

What it is not: not Google Maps, not genealogy software, not a flight tracker. The arcs are about the motion of a line, not the aesthetic of an airline, and there is no aeroplane, no compass rose and no pin drop anywhere.

Illustrated places

Seven generic building types drawn as single-weight line: a terrace, a school, a mill, a high street, a station, a church, a seaside shelter. They appear in two places only: beside a map label, and in the chapter that pairs a building with a question.

Never a real address. That is the rule that keeps this from becoming somebody's actual house, and it is the same rule that got four AI images deleted from the live site. No sepia, no shading, no Victorian pastiche: contemporary architectural line.

Archive and documents

Nothing here is a scan. No fabricated newspaper, no invented letter, no handwriting, no clipping. The document cards are deliberately abstract: a label, a real sentence, and four ruled lines that read as a document without pretending to be one.

Genuine family material is a future asset, not a design device, and it needs a family's permission and a look at provenance and copyright before it goes anywhere near a production page. Historic newspaper scans in particular are not automatically free to use.

Interaction

Five, and every one carries the same idea: fragment, memory, connection, story.

1. The year travels back from 2026 to 1938 on load, inside the wordmark. 2. The route draws as you scroll and each place announces itself. 3. Blocks and photographs reveal once on entry. 4. Scattered fragments gather and fade as the finished passage rises through them. 5. The nav arrives only after the hero, so nothing sits above the lock-up.

Nothing is needed to understand the page. With reduced motion on, every element renders in its finished state, the route is drawn complete, every dot is lit and the text list carries the places. Nothing is behind an animation.

Photographs

a-conversation.jpg stays in chapter 1, where the subject is a person telling somebody something. It is not the hero any more: the wordmark is.

existing-material.jpg moved to chapter 4, beside the copy about working from what a family already has, which is where two people looking at pages actually means something.

photographs-on-a-table.jpg is one of the fragments that resolves into the passage. a-box-of-photographs.jpg sits with the finished object. amanda.jpg is in chapter 5 and on the About reduction.

All still the Pexels stand-ins already on the live site. Real photography remains the single highest-value outstanding item, and none of this changes that.

Accessibility

Both directions pass the fleet contrast gate at 0 unreadable and 0 sub-AA, on all four pages. Getting there needed real fixes, not nudged swatches: light cards inside dark chapters were inheriting the chapter's light text, and accents chosen on paper did not survive on chocolate or olive.

Accents that carry text clear 4.5:1 on every ground they sit on. Accents used only for graphics, the route and rules, sit at 3:1 or better. The map has a title and a description naming all seven places in order, and the same information is repeated as a text list.

On a phone

What goes: both sticky stages. The map stops being scroll-driven and renders complete, the side labels disappear entirely and the text list carries every place, year and note. The fragments stop being scattered and become a plain stack, and the passage is simply there.

What stays: the travelling year in the hero, the reveals, the full colour system, the illustrations and every word. Nothing is mobile-only and nothing is desktop-only in content terms.