Introducing the Cultural Fabric Program
Map What Matters - Together
Cultural Fabric: Map Your Community’s Stories
Cultural Fabric is a flexible platform for mapping, managing, and sharing local heritage. More than a digital map, it turns historical records, landmarks, and cultural assets into interactive experiences that engage residents, visitors, and volunteers alike.
Every community has a history, and every history should be preserved. Turn your heritage sites into community promotion, attracting new visitors and residents alike.
We work with historical societies, genealogy clubs, cemetery boards, preservationists, and tourism organizations to uncover stories that have long been overlooked—early settlers, immigrant laborers, Indigenous communities, and other groups whose contributions shaped your town.
With Cultural Fabric, you can:
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Map cemeteries, historic sites, and cultural landscapes - creating a digital twin of these important cultural assets so you can share and preserve your local legacies.
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Link burial records, family histories, and census data
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Curate inclusive narratives that highlight equity and context
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Build story-driven maps for tours, lectures, and heritage trails
Inspire the Next Generation
Cultural Fabric engages young preservationists with hands-on mapping, digital storytelling, and community projects. Students and volunteers can document historic sites, record local stories, and create heritage trails—seeing their work come alive on interactive maps that preserve and celebrate their town’s history.
We don’t map everything. We map what matters—together.
Built for Your Community
Cultural Fabric connects your community’s places, stories, and people using tools you already have. It’s designed to grow with your vision—one site, one story, one step at a time.
Modular by Design
Start Small, Build Over Time
Community History Builder
The Community History Builder lets local historians, genealogy clubs, and volunteers map heritage sites, tag historic events, and upload photos, documents, and oral histories to bring their town’s past to life.
From heritage trails and self-guided tours to digital storytelling experiences, the platform connects visitors to meaningful places and local voices.
We’re launching pilot events across Iowa, giving communities hands-on support to begin documenting and sharing their history—one landmark, one story, one neighborhood at a time.
Cemetery Management
The Cemetery Mapper module helps cemetery managers preserve burial records, map grave locations, and reveal the stories hidden in your community’s cemeteries. Use it as a cemetery management information system or expand to connect to the Cultural Fabric and link gravesites to family trees, census records, and historic events.
Turn cemeteries into educational and heritage tourism destinations with mapped walking tours, digital biographies, and interpretive signage—all integrated with your local GIS infrastructure for seamless management and public engagement.
Census Mapper™
Census Mapper lets you reconstruct historic neighborhoods and link individuals to the places they lived. By combining detailed census data with georeferenced historic maps, it creates a dynamic view of the people, places, and patterns that shaped your community.
Search by age, occupation, ethnicity, or household, and watch neighborhoods evolve across decades. Whether exploring a city block or a rural township, Census Mapper helps you trace families, visualize communities, and uncover the stories behind migration, development, and local history.
Main Street Navigator
This interactive tool uses 360° imagery and overlaid historic photos to bring your downtown districts to life—past and present. Dive into the stories behind local landmarks, view buildings in 3D, and explore how your Main Street has evolved. Perfect for sharing community history, supporting local businesses, and inviting visitors to experience your heritage in person. Part of the Cultural Fabric platform, it links each building to a broader story—census records, homes, workplaces, and even final resting places—bringing your built heritage to life, one layer at a time.
Genealogy Linker
Designed to bridge public records with personal discovery, the Genealogy Linker connects burial data, census records, land ownership, and more to help users trace family histories and community ties. If you're part of a local Genealogy Society, this module is for you!
Whether you're researching the people behind a place, or inventorying your community's historical families, this module makes it easy to search, visualize, and understand the threads that bind us.
Historic Map Explorer
The Historic Map Explorer lets you view georeferenced historic maps on today’s landscapes—making it easy to see what’s changed, what’s remained, and what’s been forgotten. From 19th-century plat maps and pictorial Bird's Eye View maps, to early 20th-century Sanborn fire insurance sheets, this module helps you explore how communities evolved and where lost landmarks once stood. Perfect for educators, planners, preservationists, and map lovers alike.
Community Powered
The Cultural Fabric Platform is meant to bring multiple organizations together to build a fully representative digital portrait of their community's past, empowering them through heritage to promote their communities as a place of pride and outside discovery.
Enable volunteers and local experts to contribute stories, audio, photos, and data through crowdsourcing tools, with optional incentives and recognition. Collaborate with us to host a volunteer workshop that brings your community’s history to life—by linking historical census data to burial and genealogical records, land ownership plat maps to historical land ownership parcels, and significant historic sites to oral histories to build a richer, map-based portrait of the people and places that shaped your community. Together, we can uncover, preserve, and share the significant events, properties, and histories that matter.
A Gateway to Local Heritage
A Digital Platform to Preserve, Promote, and Connect
Join us!
Help shape the future of our collective Cultural Fabric.
Cultural Fabric is more than just a mapping tool—it's a dynamic, evolving Spatial Humanities initiative that seamlessly integrates technology, history, and community involvement. This platform allows us to explore the past in interactive and meaningful ways. We invite community leaders, tourism bureaus, cemetery managers, and genealogists to contribute to the future of cultural asset mapping by linking people, places, and events across time. Whether you're managing cultural data, seeking new ways to engage the public, or uncovering connections between historical figures, events, and sites, Cultural Fabric provides the tools to map and share these crucial stories. Our platform enables the creation of organized, interactive inventories of historical sites, with the option for users to keep data private if preferred. Become a pioneer partner, follow our journey through our personal journal, or share your insights through our survey to shape the future of digital history.