Some old websites preserve pages. Naval-History.Net preserves the paperwork of entire fleets.
The site was created by Gordon Smith in 1998. According to its memorial page, it began with books he had written about the Royal and Dominion navies of World War II and expanded over the next eighteen years into a large research archive built around contemporary records.
Smith died in 2016, but the site remains online and active as a memorial to both its creator and the sailors he was trying to document.
Its scope is enormous.
The navigation runs from the pre-World War I era through both world wars, the inter-war period, postwar history and the Falklands War. There are casualty lists for British, Dominion and American naval services; fleet and organisation material; officer lists; armour development; memoirs; campaign chronologies; and transcribed contemporary accounts.
Then there are the log books.
314 Royal Navy logs and roughly 350,000 transcribed pages
The Royal Navy log-book project lists 314 logs online and about 350,000 pages transcribed from the World War I era.
Those logs cover ships operating at places such as Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, East Africa, the China Station and the Battle of the Falklands.
A related collection brings in United States Navy, Revenue Cutter Service, Coast Guard and Coast & Geodetic Survey logs, many connected to the Old Weather citizen-science project. Volunteers extract both historical events and weather observations from the original ship records.
This is where an independent history website stops being merely a secondary source.
The value is not just that Naval-History.Net explains a battle. It helps researchers get closer to the documents produced while the ships were actually operating.
The casualty work follows the same pattern. Don Kindell’s Royal and Dominion Navy casualty lists were compiled from original Admiralty documents, while American lists draw on sources such as the American Battle Monuments Commission, Bureau of Naval Personnel and other official records.
That kind of aggregation is boring right up until somebody needs the name of one sailor, one ship on one date, or a weather entry from one day in the Arctic.
Then it becomes the whole reason the Web is useful.
Naval-History.Net is also a good example of why CacheRat’s Ancient Web research list is not simply a collection of funny old designs. A plain, aging site can represent decades of human indexing work that would be difficult to reconstruct if the domain vanished.
The interface is old-fashioned.
The research is not.