The Greensted FoundationThe Greensted Foundation
Don’t throw them away.
When someone dies, families are often left with boxes of photographs they cannot identify but cannot bear to destroy.
We are exploring a free service that would collect, digitise and preserve those photographs for future generations.
Register your interestThis is an early public-interest experiment. We will not sell your details or use them for unrelated marketing.
Help us test whether this service should exist
Leave your email address and we will let you know if the service moves forward. There is no charge and no commitment.
How it would work
Simple. Free. Dignified.
1. Request a preservation box
We send you a suitable box with prepaid postage.
2. Send us the photographs
You place the photographs inside and return them at no cost.
3. We digitise them
Each photograph is carefully digitised, then the physical original is recycled responsibly. What we keep is the image itself.
No family history should end in a skip.
About
A note from the founder
I started thinking about the Greensted Foundation while looking for photographs of my grandfather.
He was my childhood hero. A travelling salesman after the Second World War, he spent decades visiting shops across Britain selling buttons, zips and haberdashery. Like so many families, ours has boxes of old photographs, some carefully labelled, many not.
As I searched through them, I found myself wondering how many families have stood in exactly the same position. Looking at photographs they cannot identify, feeling unable to throw them away, yet unsure what else to do.
Every year, countless family photographs disappear when homes are cleared after someone dies. Not because they are unwanted, but because nobody knows who the people are or where the pictures belong.
That feels like an unnecessary loss.
Today, we have the technology to preserve these photographs digitally and, over time, perhaps even reconnect names, places and stories that have been forgotten. Whether that proves possible or not, preserving them is surely better than losing them forever.
The Greensted Foundation begins with a simple belief.
No family history should end in a skip.
This website is our first experiment. If enough people believe this service should exist, we'll build it together.
Jonathan Greensted
Founder, The Greensted Foundation
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Supporting this work
Help this go further
Ideas like this only become real services with proper support behind them. If you would be interested in helping fund this work as it grows, as a founding benefactor of the Greensted Foundation, we would welcome hearing from you.
Thank you. We have noted your interest and will be in touch about supporting the Foundation.