Terms of Service

1. Who we are

MyHistoryStone sells a physical keepsake stone with a printed QR code, and hosts the tribute page that code opens. These terms are the agreement between you and MyHistoryStone. By buying a stone, creating a page, or adding to somebody else's page, you agree to them.

If anything here is unclear, ask us before you buy. You can reach us through the support page.

2. Your page stays up. Permanently.

This is the most important promise we make, so it comes first: we do not charge you to keep a tribute page visible. A page you create stays up whether you pay us again or not. There is no subscription that, if it lapses, takes somebody's memorial offline.

What money buys is the ability to change a page and to add things to it. Never the right for it to exist.

3. What you pay for

The stone is a one-time purchase. Additional stones for the same page are a one-time purchase each.

Every page comes with 30 days of free editing from the day it is created. After that, a single edit can be bought on its own, or unlimited edits can be bought as an annual plan. If an annual plan lapses, your page stays exactly as it was and stays visible - you simply cannot change it again until you buy another edit or renew.

Prices are shown on the pricing and shop pages and are what you pay at checkout. Payments are handled by Stripe; we never see or store your card number.

4. Shipping, returns and refunds

We ship within the United States. Because each stone is printed with a code unique to one page, it cannot be resold, so returns are handled case by case rather than by a blanket policy. If a stone arrives damaged, unreadable, or wrong, tell us and we will make it right.

If you want a refund, use the refund request form linked from your order. We would rather fix the problem than keep money for something you are unhappy with.

5. What you put on a page

You are responsible for what you publish. By adding text, photographs, links or recordings, you confirm that you have the right to publish them - that the photographs are yours or you have permission, and that what you have written is true to the best of your knowledge.

Do not publish anything that is unlawful, that harasses or defames somebody, that infringes copyright, or that discloses private information about a living person without their agreement.

Historical storytelling involves some embellishment, and we do not pretend otherwise. Inventing a story wholesale is a different thing, and it is not welcome here.

6. What we may do with what you write

You keep ownership of everything you contribute. You are not signing your family's story over to us.

You do grant us a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide licence to host, store, display, index, translate and reproduce your content, and to include it in the public archive and in MyHistoryStone's own collections, publications and marketing. That licence is what lets us keep a page online for a hundred years, let search engines find it, and put a story in front of somebody who would otherwise never have read it.

The limit on that licence matters as much as the licence: we do not sell or rent your personal information - your contact details, or the record of who is related to whom - to anybody. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to genealogy companies. Our privacy policy says the same thing in more detail.

If a page is set to private, none of the above applies to it beyond hosting and displaying it to people who have the link.

7. Public, private, and being featured

Every page has a visibility setting. A public page can be found through search on this site and by search engines. A private page is reachable only by its direct link or its QR code, and is kept out of both.

There is a second, separate setting for whether a page may be shown to people who were not looking for it - in a browsable collection, a future app, or our own marketing. The two are deliberately different questions, and agreeing to the first does not agree to the second.

You can change either setting at any time, including after the free editing window has closed. Turning something off takes effect immediately; material already printed or published elsewhere obviously cannot be recalled.

8. Guestbook entries and contributions

Anyone can add a memory to a public page without creating an account. We ask for a name, which is shown, and optionally an email address, which is never shown publicly and exists only so the page owner or we can follow up if an entry causes a problem.

Entries appear immediately. The owner of a page can hide or remove any entry on it, and does not need a reason. Anybody can report an entry for review; reporting flags it for a human and does not hide it by itself.

We may hide or remove an entry anywhere on the site if it breaks section 5.

9. Linking pages together

Pages can be linked to show a relationship - spouse, parent, sibling and so on. A link only exists when the owners of both pages agree to it. Nobody can attach your family member to their page without your approval, and you can withdraw a link later.

10. Archive pages

Some pages on this site were written by us from public-domain sources - government records, works published before 1931, and photographs dedicated to the public domain. They are marked as ours and are here so the site is not empty and so the format is clear. If you hold rights in something we have used and we have got it wrong, tell us and we will correct or remove it.

11. Accounts

You need an account to create or edit a page. Keep your sign-in details to yourself; you are responsible for what happens under your account. Accounts are for adults - if you are under 18, ask a parent to buy and manage the page.

We may suspend an account that is being used to break these terms.

12. What we do not promise

We intend a page to last a very long time, and we have built the pricing so that nothing lapses into deletion. But we are a small business, not an institution, and we cannot promise the internet or this company will outlive everyone. Keep your own copies of photographs and text that matter to you. The site is provided as it is, without warranties beyond those the law gives you and does not let us exclude.

To the extent the law allows, our liability to you is limited to what you have paid us.

13. Changes to these terms

If we change these terms in a way that materially affects what we may do with your content, we will say so on this page and date it. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept it. If you do not, make your page private or ask us to remove it.

14. Law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, United States.