Long before every historical subject had a thousand SEO pages explaining the same five facts, one person could build a reference site simply because the subject had taken over enough of her brain.
Visit TudorHistory.org’s Six Wives of Henry VIII section
TudorHistory.org is Lara Eakins’ independent hobby project devoted to the Tudor period.
The Six Wives section is one of its simplest entry points: Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Kathryn Howard, and Katherine Parr, arranged with marriage dates and the brutally efficient summaries of how each marriage ended.
Annulled. Executed. Died. Annulled. Executed. Widowed.
Henry VIII really did produce one of history’s least reassuring status dashboards.
But the wives page is only the front door.
A personal site that turned into infrastructure
The larger TudorHistory.org includes monarch biographies, a who’s-who section, chronologies, historical places, genealogical trees, glossaries, maps, primary and secondary texts, poetry, student help, film and television material, a news blog, and a long-running question-and-answer section.
Eakins is explicit about what the site is and is not.
She describes it as a personal hobby project, not the publication of a university, company, or historical organization. Her professional background is in astronomy, while Tudor history is the subject she kept studying, organizing, and publishing independently.
That distinction is useful rather than embarrassing.
The old Web was full of serious amateur scholarship in the literal sense: work done because somebody cared deeply enough to learn the subject, cite books, build timelines, answer questions, scan documents, and revise pages over years without needing to turn the interest into an institution.
TudorHistory.org also exposes its sources more openly than many modern summary sites. Its bibliography lists major biographies, academic histories, reference works, museum guides, and books on the Tudors. The texts section preserves links and transcriptions for items such as the Act of Supremacy, correspondence around Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I material, Mary I’s will, and other historical documents.
The site even keeps Q&A archives where readers asked things that do not fit neatly into a textbook chapter: burial locations, family relationships, portraits, court roles, genealogical questions, and the dozens of small uncertainties that appear once someone gets past the famous names.
That is where a personal reference site becomes useful infrastructure.
In 2026, the Web has no shortage of Tudor material. What is rarer is continuity: one curator maintaining the same subject area long enough that biographies, source lists, questions, maps, family trees, and corrections start to reinforce one another.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes sites like this because durable specialist websites often become more valuable with age even when their layout never learns what a hero section is.
History did not need a content strategy.
It needed somebody willing to keep the notes organized.