The Succssor Site to LithuanianMaps.com Launches November 29 at Vilnius's CartoCon

Poster created by the Lithuanian Cartographic Society (LKD) promoting the launch

I am so happy to announce the November 29, 2024 launch of the successor site to LithuanianMaps.com by the Lietuvos kartografu draugija. I created LithuanianMaps.com in 2008 using a platform offered by Yahoo! to be something that did not exist at the time: a resource of downloadable high-definition images of maps created before 1945 of the historic Lithuanian area: what is today the area of the three Baltic republics, Northeastern Poland, the Kaliningrad Oblast, and Belarus.

At the time I already had been buying and collecting actual antique maps of the area for 20 years -- since 1988 – buying them on eBay and from map dealers in London, Amsterdam, Paris – wherever and whenever I went on vacation. At the same time, I began downloading and printing images of every map of the area I could find on the Internet: the beginning of LithuanianMaps.com was binders of paper images. In the first year after I built and launched my site, I was getting over 500 visits a week.

But nothing lasts forever on the Internet: in January 2021, I was given 60 days notice by Yahoo! that the free software I had used to build my site would no longer be supported. As of March 31, 2021, the site became static, and the prospect, at the age of 73, of having to create a new site and transferring 4,300 images was devastating.

I mentioned my problem to Giedrė Beconytė, Secretary of the Lithuanian Cartographic Society (LKD) and Professor at Vilnius University, and with whom I had been talking since January 2016, when my membership in the LKD was approved.  Meanwhile, in October that same year I received an email from the recently appointed Permanent Representative of Lithuania to the United Nations: Rytis Paulauskas, seeking to establish contact with me, and mentioning his frequent perusal of LithuanianMaps.com.

That same month, Ambassador Paulauskas offered to review a grant proposal by Giedrė Beconytė asking for financial support from the Lithuanian Government for transferring the content of LithuanianMaps.com to a platform hosted by the LKD. His suggestions for improvement of the proposal were key: critical would be the LKD's recognition that the site is of ongoing importance both to researchers and to future outreach efforts not only to people around the world with Lithuanian ancestry, but to those who would be interested if they only knew of the country's thousand-year-plus history.

By last Spring, 2024, two financial grants had been received from Lithuania’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and over 4,000 images had been transferred to the new platform by the LKD. And now, at CartoCon 2024, November 29, in Vilnius, the new site is ready for launch.