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| project44.ca is live in a completely new form. Same archive, same map, new everything else.
The old site ran on Squarespace. It was slow, it was expensive for a nonprofit, and it had reached the point where three different pages quoted three different numbers for the size of the archive. On a project whose entire claim is accuracy, that is not a cosmetic problem.
So it has been rebuilt from scratch as a static site, hand-built and self-hosted on our own server. Pages load in a fraction of the time. It works properly on a phone, which matters because most of you are reading this on one. The hosting bill dropped. And when something needs fixing, we fix it ourselves that day instead of working around a page builder.
Go and look. It is the same free archive it has always been. |
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150,000+
Unit positions mapped
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15,000+
War diary pages digitized
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10 million+
Words of primary source
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15
Nations with mapped units
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| Every one of those positions traces back to a scanned document. Allied and German, day by day, June 1944 to May 1945. |
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Four places you can go and stand
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| Four photographs from the archive. Every one was taken at a spot you could drive to this summer. In one of them, the alley the tank is firing from is now somebody’s garage. |
Infantrymen of the Edmonton Regiment in a Universal Carrier, using an umbrella for shade. Sicily, 1943.
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Olmsted has just sent word through his radio: Zwolle is free. After a night of tension and rumour, the message reaches Canadian headquarters.
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Aerial photo of the pontoon bridge over the Schipbeek canal, taken 8 April 1945. The South Saskatchewan Regiment crossed here on the night of 6/7 April.
Laurier Military History Archive
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C Squadron SAR tank 42 covers Argyll infantrymen as they advance. Note the knocked out Tiger at front right. The alley the tank is in is now a garage.
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| Browse all 232 photographs → |
| All four of these are geotagged. Members can open them on the beta map, sitting on the exact ground where the shutter was pressed, alongside the unit that was there that day. That is the part we are most pleased with, and the part that is hardest to explain in an email. |
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The beta map opens to everyone in September
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| The beta is the rebuilt map platform. It is faster than the public map, it carries far more of the archive, and it has the tools the old one could never support: orders of battle, document overlays, OCR upload, drawing, and the geotagged photographs.
Right now it is open to members only, because members are funding it and because it is genuinely still a beta. Things break. We would rather they break in front of a few hundred people who will tell us about it.
We are aiming to open it to the public in September. That is a target, not a promise. If it slips, we will tell you it slipped rather than quietly changing the date. |
| See what the beta looks like → |
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Who paid for all this
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| Members did. Project ’44 carries no advertising, no paywall on the public archive, and no institutional funding covering the day to day work. It runs on monthly memberships through Patreon, and that money goes to server costs, archive access fees, document scanning, and the developers doing the rebuild.
The archive stays free. It always has. Membership is what makes the next 15,000 pages possible, and it gets you into the beta before it opens. |
| Supporter, $4 a month. Patron-only updates and behind-the-scenes insights, the members’ Discord, and early access to new historical content and the development blog. |
| Builder, $8.99 a month. Everything above, plus a discount on the store, research services and story map creation, and you can submit livestream questions in advance. |
| Historian, $19.99 a month. Everything above, plus voting on monthly topics and direct research access: the team helps you locate war diaries, unit records and archival sources. |
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| Seven day free trial. Cancel any time. Prices are in US dollars; Patreon converts to Canadian at checkout. |
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| One thing we could use from you. A site rebuilt this quickly will have broken links, wrong dates, and pages that look fine on our machines and terrible on yours. If you find one, hit reply and tell us. Include the page address if you can. Every report gets read.
More soon. |
Nathan Kehler
Executive Director, Canadian Research and Mapping Association |
Patreon
Royal Canadian Legion, US Branch #25 