Ten Years! 1998-2008
Please contact The Maritime Heritage Project to request a detailed proposal or with any questions you may have about the Project.
More than 20,000 hours have gone into the project at this point (not including 40 years of travel and research: Refer to Bibliography), but much more can be and should be added to the site.
For ten years, the site has been considered a valuable reference, receives more than 80,000 accesses per month, and is well-regarded by researchers, educators (4% of all page views), genealogists, and professionals in the maritime field. Comments include: "There is no other site like it in the world," "I use your site as a resource for our docents," "my students research your site for their history papers," and "I've been searching for my great-great-grandfather for years; I found him on your site."
The Maritime Heritage Project honors men, women, captains and their ships for enduring commitment in protecting shorelines and in moving merchandise, livestock, and people around the world under generally unpredictable and often dangerous conditions.
The site also illustrates that America belongs to everyone; the health and wealth of this nation was formed by individuals from every nation who migrated to its shores seeking refuge and opportunity.
Thus, Angel Funders/Sponsors/Contributors are needed.
Site Statistics (as of September 2, 2007)
Statistics are supplied through Urchin (charts available for verification upon request) and Alexa.comTestimonials
Average Monthly Visitors: 19,590A growing number of these accesses come from Australia (4.5%) and England (5.4%). Visitors view as many as five pages and a significant number stay between 5 and 30 minutes.
Average Monthly Page Views: 33,660
Average Monthly Hits: 88,200
The site was reworked and content added beginning November 2007; by March 2008, accesses climbed by 47%.
Testimonials started arriving the month this site was launched in 1998; among the first eMails was that of an English gentleman who had been seeking his great-great grandparents for many years and found them on this site.Products and Services
That email was followed by requests from a French student preparing a Master's thesis on the French in California during the Gold Rush.
A personal favorite is from James P. Delgado, author of To California by Sea: A Maritime History of the California Gold Rush. He wrote that this is the only site of its kind in that it is listing all ships and passengers arriving at the port of San Francisco.
- June 2007
Thank you for Captain E H Hitchcock. Your efforts to transcribe Daily Alta California list of Ship Arrivals lead to location of Fred's Wife's ancestor. All we had was Betty Hitchcock's "Gone to California as ship's captain" info. . . We really appreciate this.
-- G. Cramer- June 2007
Thank you very much for your help. You told me in a previous message that you are working on this project by yourself. I'm impressed with your work and recognize pain of research. -- Regards, L. Mims- May 2007
Thank you very much for pointing me in the right direction. Very handy site you have; it has been of great value to my research from here. You must visit New Zealand again. -- Regards, D. Armitrage- June 2006
I have enjoyed your site, located the arrival of my 2nd great grandfather in August of 1849 on the Humboldt. Lots of information on the site. Thank you and all the others for all the work it took to place the information on the net for all to discover. -- Barb- May 2006
I've enjoyed your web site while looking for photos and marine drawings/plans of side wheel steamers built by William H. Brown during the 1850s . . .. We are trying to build a scale model (of the S.S. Pacific) for display. -- Thank you, M. Boyd- November 2004
Guess you've heard it before, but you've got a fantastic website. Great job and thanks for the enjoyment. -- D. Hunt
Reference Site: The focus will continue as a content/reference site for maritime history in and around San Francisco Bay and will focus on the build-out of specific areas, i.e.:SponsorshipseBooks:
- Captains
- Ships: Hundreds of people have asked for images of a given ship, captain or personage arriving in San Francisco during the mid-1800s.
- Civil War Troop Ships in San Francisco
- Passengers: Additions to the lists, valuable to genealogists around the world, an increasing number of which are arriving from Australian's seeking ancestors;
- Routes and Ports
- What They Found On Arrival
- VIPs with details of their contributions to the State of California
Publishing and the Internet have become intertwined as a method of marketing and distributing books, both as hard copies and as eBooks to be downloaded at low cost. ePublishing is a growth industry. Manuscripts will generally be under 100 pages and in 8-1/2x11 format. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world want the information provided on the site, and because of distance from original sources, they do not have access to original manuscripts. Prices will be $5-$20 each depending on the amount of time into each publication and costs of reprint rights for images.
From maritime-related entities, i.e. shipping lines, cruise lines, maritime products, etc., which have resulted in logos placed on the site
Residual Income, i.e.
Affiliate Marketing partners such as Amazon.com, Ancestry.com, InternationalHarbors.com, each of which has provided modest (but growing) income to The Maritime Heritage Project through online purchases through the site.
Marketing Plan
Due to strong site access, a portion of the marketing is built-in. Additionally, The Maritime Heritage principal is certified in ePro Marketing, which has proven viable and valuable: The eMail marketing methods were part of the teamwork that sold two Sausalito, California homes (exceeding $1.4 million each) in less than a week a after thay had been on the market for one year with another agent.Operational Plan
D.A. Levy has every eMail ever sent to The Maritime Heritage Project and is developing a monthly newsletter to begin in early 2008.
The principal has two other web sites pointing to The Maritime Heritage Project and the site is listed on major maritime search engines around the world, including maritime museum sites, shipping lines such as American President Lines, and merchant marine sites. The Maritime Heritage site is also used as a training/reference site by the San Francisco Maritime Museum and J. Porter Shaw Maritime Library in San Francisco. Thus, new eyes visit the site daily.
The market is international: Given the aging of America, family historians/genealogists are blossoming. San Francisco Bay Area has 6,605,428 residents, many with ancestors who arrived by ship. Internationally, 72 cruise ship lines carry more than 1 million passengers annually and that industry is growing (it is expected to exceed oil revenues). Thousands of families have an "historian" (one genealogical library received 30 million viewers, although a timeframe was not given nor numbers substantiated).
Operations are minimal, requiring only a small office and equipment such as an up-to-date cmp/computer, printer and scanner (which I have). Day-to-day operations entail research, defining information to be included on the site or in eBooks, imputing and uploading information.Management and Organization
Because The Maritime Heritage Project was set up as a non-profit in 1998, it has had a governing board. However, no funds have been raised under the non-profit banner, so little paperwork has been filed. It may be that the status is defunct and, in any case, it is of little consequence as the site speaks to dedication to the original mission which is to provide free information to researchers seeking ancestral travel to the West Coast of North America.Expenses and Financial Plan
It is the intent to keep this organization just as it has been with the addition of a fact-checker and a few products to offset expenses. The Maritime Heritage Project is the work of Dianne Blethen Adams Levy, started in honor of Captain James H. Blethen, her great-great-grandfather. It grew as fascination with sea history and as inquiries continued to arrive from around the world, along with accolades for this body of work. It is sans levels of bureaucracy and should be kept that way. D.A. Levy is the executive-everything: manager, director, developer, researcher, web designer/coder, typist, etc. More time needs to be devoted to development as it has been a part-time project since inception. And a fact-checker is warranted given the importance the site to individuals searching to document historical information.
Anticipated expenses include salary for the project director and fees for copying, travel (mostly local to/from historical societies), acquisition and/or reprint rights of prints, maps, etc., i.e.
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