We're making history accessible to everyone
Pastmaps is a small husband-and-wife company dedicated to creating a centralized system for historical map research, exploration, and collaboration.
Pastmaps was born in early 2023 when our founder, Craig, set out to create a website that could serve historical maps from a wide variety of sources and provide easy-to-use tooling to streamline and simplify his research efforts for his metal-detecting hobby. As it turns out, a huge number of both hobbyists and professionals also needed those same tools for a wide variety of use-cases, such as environmental due diligence, real estate, civil engineering, genealogy research, and, of course, metal detecting just to name a few.
Many other people just loved the maps themselves and wondered if they could get prints of the maps in our database. Thus, Pastmaps added a print purchasing feature for users in late 2023. Shortly thereafter, Craig's wife, Savannah joined the effort, using her artistic eye and graphical editing skills to allow Pastmaps to offer our curated maps in multiple sizes and aspect ratios and to elevate the visual display of each map on a case-by-case basis to make them truly works of art.
Today, Pastmaps offers over 185,000 unique maps covering the entirety of the United States and territories across 150+ years of history. Our tooling has been used to support research and projects across a mind-blowing and ever-growing number of fields. Our map prints have brightened people’s homes, brought joy to families, been featured on TV, and even hung in museums. We are so glad that Pastmaps has already been able to touch so many people, and we look forward to continuing to grow and bring historical maps and research tools to the people who need them.
