There are currently 137 openly flagged unresolved questions in the Wooden Boat Atlas — dates that two sources disagree about, names that could not be matched to a documented person, yards whose founding year nobody has written down. Every one of them is an invitation.
The people most likely to be able to answer them are not archivists. They are owners, families, shipwrights, class secretaries and the person who has been sailing hull number twelve for thirty years.
What makes a useful contribution
A claim plus a source. That is the whole standard. The source does not have to be an archive — a class newsletter, a builder's plaque, a photograph with a date on the back, a family letter, a survey report, or your own first-hand knowledge clearly identified as such. What matters is that a reader can tell where the fact came from and weigh it.
Things that are especially welcome: build dates from documentation rather than lore; the yard a boat actually came from; a designer's birth and death years; the resolution of a name this atlas has flagged as a variant; photographs of a boat with provenance; and corrections to anything we have simply got wrong.
Things that will be recorded but marked: recollections without a document behind them. These are genuinely valuable — much of maritime history exists nowhere else — and the Wooden Boat Atlas will carry them, attributed and dated, rather than either discarding them or dressing them up as archival fact.
How to send it
Every entry carries a Suggest a correction link that opens an email with the entry name and its address already filled in. Or write directly to corrections@ggwbf.org.
Longer material — a family history, a yard's records, a run of photographs — is welcome too. Say what you have and we will work out how to handle it.
What happens to it
Contributions are reviewed by the Golden Gate Wooden Boat Foundation and, where they hold up, added with the source attributed. If you would rather not be named, say so. If a contribution resolves a flagged question, the flag comes down and the resolution is recorded in the project logbook.
Everything published here is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, which means your contribution stays free for anyone to reuse and adapt with attribution. By sending material for publication you are agreeing to that. It also means you keep no exclusive claim over it — which is the point of a shared record.
The data is open too
The atlas is generated from structured data, and that data is published as open JSON. If you would rather work with the whole dataset than a single entry — to check it, to build something else on it, or to mirror it — help yourself.
Wooden Boat Atlas v3.0 · built 30 July 2026 · a project of the Golden Gate Wooden Boat Foundation · licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 · open data · corrections