[Soupy]

I run https://pastmaps.com as a lil' solo bootstrapped labor of love. Think Google Maps, but for OLD maps. It has 185K+ fully georeferenced high-res maps covering all of America, as well as satellite, LiDAR, and 3D layers to enable exploration through space and time.

History is cool yo. And apparently lucrative - it currently makes ~$5000/mo and is slowly but surely growing through word of mouth

[registeredcorn]

At a guess, you probably have a very large base of genealogists on there!

Old maps are incredibly useful for genealogy because it helps you do lots of stuff. Say someone lived on "House #3 Country Road" in (county), but County Road no longer exists, and all that can be found is a brief description of "County Road is now Main Street, Bank Avenue, and Church Road" It would serve as a vital clue as to where their ancestors house used to be (or may still be!)

It also helps to give a better narrative of how the community has expanded and changed over the years. Instead of just, "It was probably all forest land, then farm land, then suburbs or something?" Instead you can see stuff like if there were spikes/declines in populations in response to various events (gold rush, mining, factory work, railroads, war, highways bringing/diverting traffic, and so on). They can also show how the land may have changed from environmental factors (mud slides, earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes). Maybe you're from a "Military family" but never knew why, only to find out that a Military Depot opened up 2 minutes from their house just as great-grandpa turned 18.

In a real sense, it describes not just the family and where they lived, but the type of place they knew, and community they grew up in. It hints at how they saw and experienced things over the years. "But why did great-great-grandpa insist on moving his entire family? He had lived in that beautiful house his entire life! Ah. They put the railroad 6 inches from his backdoor!"

[Soupy]

You hit the nail on the head - my primary use-case is genealogy research!

[gcanyon]

> tiny husband and wife company based in Seattle, WA.

Are you in any way associated with that map shop near Pike Place? I had to look it up, I guess it's Metsker?

[Soupy]

No but I love that shop! I actually introduced myself to the owner there and told him about how I also run an online map shop and he got immediately super duper weird. Lol. Cut-throat business I guess?

[seanconaty]

I love this site. I love browsing David Rumsey's map collection and I know that they have a georeferenceing feature, but I haven't used it.

[Soupy]

I also love David Rumsey's collection! Check out the rumsey map center at Stanford if you ever find yourself in the area, it's ridiculously cool

Pastmaps was really born out of my desire for more advanced features, layers, and tools on rumsey's site and I'm hoping I can eventually deliver on that vision (spoilers: I'm definitely not there yet)

[DocSavage]

Nice collection. I'd suggest adding an unsubscribe option to your initial email, particularly if people reflexively login via Google, etc.

[martyz]

This is such an awesome app - great work!

[gloflo]

Where did you acquire those scans?

[Soupy]

Vast majority are currently from the USGS, but this is going to wildly shift and diversify soon as I've been working to bring a wider variety of sources. The next wave is coming mainly from public library systems from all across the globe (my background is in search so I literally am running a map crawler)

I stand on the shoulders of these giants that have done amazing work to digitize the paper maps and I mainly am hoping to just aid in the ease of discoverability and exploration of these assets

[kmoser]

Possible minor bug: I searched for "New York, NY, USA" and it showed 41 maps of only Staten Island. I had to search for "Manhattan, New York, NY, USA" to get the maps I was looking for.

[Soupy]

Thank you! It's actually a bit embarassing but my search uses the central lat,lng returned from Google's places API and then finds all intersecting maps. It's just not the right approach for a broad place based search. I'm in the process of integrating full geometry data globally from https://overturemaps.org/ as I type to fix this across the board and to use the definitive boundary geometry for the under-the-hood map lookups

Thanks for the report and for checking out the site!

[nicbou]

What do you make money from? Map sales?

[Soupy]

It's currently 60% premium subscriptions to unlock advanced features (LiDAR layers for example) and then 40% for more traditional physical map print sales. I didn't intend to get into the physical ecommerce world with this but customers kept asking over and over again for ways to purchase the maps for display so I finally gave in last year. Figuring out the supply chain, shipping, graphics design process, etc has been a bit of a lift but fun to do. We have 2.2M unique product variants available so that's also been a bit fun to wrangle!

[baud147258]

I haven't tested, but in addition to map sales there's a subscription option, for more features https://pastmaps.com/plus?src=header

[saomcomrad56]

Do you have any old maps for Panama? Perhaps the canal zone?

[Soupy]

Soon! I currently only have coverage for the US but I am expanding globally in Q1 2025. Just not enough hours in the day