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. In 2013, Bob had the grand idea of overlaying census records over historical maps. The GIS user group led Kibbee to David Furber in 2014. Bob recruited David to the board of The History Center in Tompkins County in 2015. Thanks to then Executive Director Rod Howe's encouragement and support, we made HistoryForge a major initiative of The History Center, and cranked out an early version as 2015 blended into 2016.

HistoryForge started with the 1910 US Census and Sanborn Fire Insurance maps of the same year. Gradually we added the 1920 and 1930 US Censuses, and kept going until we had a place for all of the censuses from 1850 to 1950. Hundreds of volunteers have contributed many thousands of hours entering data, researching, reviewing, merging, and correcting the records and data in HistoryForge.

Eve Snyder started as a volunteer, and now runs the HistoryForge show. As Eve Snyder was finishing up her History Ph.D. at Binghamton University, she came up to Ithaca to volunteer at one of our census bees. Hooked on digital history, she became Project Coordinator in 2019 thanks to a grant from the from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) of the National Archives (NARA). Eve has served as the Director of HistoryForge since the inception of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant in 2022.

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 and NEH grants have funded David to continue building HistoryForge. At the time, David worked at GORGES, the local web development firm that still generously hosts the project, even as David moved on to become a software engineer at TrueCar. David got a Ph.D. in History from SUNY Buffalo and was looking for a way to contribute to digital history.

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.