PhotographHighland Beach in its later years — from the Sandlass family collection.Sandlass family collection. Used with permission.

Your photograph. Your family. Your story.

We scan it and hand it right back. The original never has to leave your hands.

Send us something

A photograph, a document, a map, a program, a ticket, a ledger, a reel of tape. If it belongs to the history of Highlands or Sandy Hook, it belongs here.

Start here →

Sit with us

An hour at your kitchen table, recorded and archived under your name. You choose what stays private.

This is the part with a clock on it →
Three ways to send

However is easiest. Nothing you send us gets kept.

Upload it now

Photographs taken with your phone are fine. So are scans. Use the form below — the file rides along with your answers.

Mail it, we mail it back

Insured both ways, at our cost, and we scan everything before it leaves our hands. We send you the scan the day it's made.

What we'd pick

We come to you

We bring the scanner to your kitchen table and you keep the originals the whole time. Most of this archive was built this way.

Send us something

Four questions and a file.

That's the whole thing. Everything else — dates, names, where it was taken — we work out together after you hear back from us.

About you
This is the credit line printed on the frame. It can be a family name, your own, or nothing at all.
About the item
“Sometime in the fifties” is a perfectly good answer.
The file

Got a very large scan, or would rather not upload? Mail it or ask us to come to you — same form, just say so in the box above.

In one sentence: you keep the copyright, we get permission to publish it with your name on it, and you can take that permission back any time by writing to us.

Read the full agreement — v1.0

I confirm that I am the owner of, or otherwise authorized to submit, the material below. I grant Above the Hook a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free license to reproduce, publish, and archive the material as part of the Highlands History Project. I ask to be attributed on-frame as named above. I understand that I retain copyright and may withdraw permission at any time by writing to archive@abovethehook.com.

What happens next

We read every submission ourselves and write back within a week. A real person, not a queue.

If we can use it, we send you the item page we'd like to publish and ask you to look it over before it goes live. Nothing appears without you seeing it first.

If we can't — usually a rights question or a scope question — we say so plainly and point you at another archive that might want it.

21 contributors, 131 items, every credit line on the frame.

Their names are on every one of them. These are the credit lines exactly as they appear in the archive.

Sandlass Family CollectionSandlass Family Collection · colorization by Above the HookGateway National Recreation Area Museum CollectionThe New York Public LibraryLibrary of Congress · HABS NJ-326Above the HookCarol M. Highsmith · Library of CongressLibrary of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
Oral history

The part with a clock on it.

An hour at your kitchen table, recorded, transcribed, and archived under your name. You choose what stays private and what doesn't.

If you'd rather sit with someone you know, tell us who and we'll ask them to be in the room.

Write to the oral history program

A recorded interview in progress,
Highlands. ATH original.