Building the Past: Historyforge, Ithaca, and beyond

Eve Snyder, HistoryForge, The History Center in Tompkins County (Ithaca, NY)

Federal census records and fire insurance maps contain a wealth of information about a community’s history. While they are available for communities across the United States, their formats render the community-level data contained within inaccessible for all but academic scholars with special training and software. With public access to these sources limited to researching individual people or addresses, the important historical community context they contain is often rendered invisible, or worse, irrelevant. HistoryForge, an open-source platform developed by The History Center in Tompkins County (New York), encourages public engagement with the historical demographic data available in census records, maps, and other sources. As a community history project, it utilizes volunteers to help create the platform’s infrastructure by transcribing census records and constructing map layers. Once the data is entered, community users can ask their own questions of the data and explore the results on a historic map layer. To map this data, it has to have standard street addresses that can be geo-addressed. In cities like Ithaca, NY, where our project started, and in Auburn and Elmira, NY, and Oberlin, OH, home to our testing partners, missing addresses can be supplemented from city directories, but in rural areas without standard street addresses, mapping census records is a larger challenge. This presentation will provide an overview of HistoryForge and discuss our next step, expanding beyond Ithaca’s city limits into the surrounding rural areas of Tompkins County, NY to map census records in areas that did not traditionally have standard street addresses.

See paper

 Presented in Session 99. Project Development