About HistoryForge

HistoryForge is a project of The History Center in Tompkins County, New York. It is brainchild of the late Bob Kibbee, the former Map and Geospatial Librarian at Cornell University. The History Center launched the project in early 2016. David Furber, currently software engineer at TrueCar, is "the programmer" that makes the code happen. Many, many volunteers continue to develop the project.

Eve Snyder started as one of those volunteers in June 2018 and was hired as Project Coordinator in October 2019 thanks to a grant from the from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) of the National Archives (NARA).

In the initial phase of development David Furber built and designed the software for building descriptions and census records on the fly, while the volunteer transcribers were entering the data. The NHPRC grant is funding David to continue designing HistoryForge, adding additional modules for user engagement.

Our goal is the development of a full-featured web environment that will provide a new way of exploring local history.

HistoryForge is open source and is being designed so that it could be adapted by any community with historical maps and untapped information resources such as the census.