About

A small time machine

Birthscape rebuilds the day someone was born from open, public records. Everything is free: there are no accounts, no payments and no database. The details you type travel inside the page link instead of being saved, and names and messages are never sent to the data sources. Privacy policy.

Where the data comes from

• Weather

  Open-Meteo Historical Weather API (ERA5 reanalysis), 1940 onwards. Licensed CC BY 4.0. Link

• Places

  Open-Meteo Geocoding API (GeoNames). Link

• Music charts

  National No. 1 singles from Wikipedia’s chart lists (Germany, UK, France and 12 more), plus the Billboard Hot 100 archive from August 1958. Link

• Song previews

  Apple iTunes Search API. Link

• Headlines & birthday twins

  Wikipedia year and country pages (CC BY-SA 4.0) and Wikidata (CC0). Link

• Picture of the day

  NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day, June 1995 onwards. Link

• Stars

  Star and constellation data from d3-celestial (BSD-3-Clause), based on the Hipparcos catalogue. Link

• Markets & inflation

  S&P 500 and US CPI from Robert Shiller's dataset; monthly gold prices (ODC-PDDL); each country's consumer prices from the World Bank (CC BY 4.0). Link

• Then and now

  Population, life expectancy, internet and mobile phone use from the World Bank (CC BY 4.0); city populations from Wikidata (CC0). Link

• Baby names

  National statistics offices: SSA (US), INSEE (France), ONS (England and Wales), SSB (Norway), SCB (Sweden), Statistics Denmark, Statistik Austria, FSO (Switzerland), CSO (Ireland), INE (Spain), Ontario, New South Wales, New Zealand DIA, the Meertens Institute (Netherlands) and GfdS (Germany). Link

Good to know

• Weather is modelled for the location, so it can differ slightly from what a local station measured.
• Prices are estimates: today's prices in the birth country, taken back with its official inflation rate. Where that isn't available, US averages are shown. Treat them as a feel for the era, not exact numbers.
• The star map shows bright stars only. Without a birth time it shows 10 pm local time.
• The written story is generated from the data on the page; no AI service is involved.