Hi Adam. Thanks for the encouraging words. My plans for this site, in addition to continuous updates to the information on each boat, are a little amorphous. Things that I have in the works include a link to the Of Brothers And Boats video at the National Sailing Hall Of Fame, an article on how to determine the vintage of your 12-1/2 without a manufacturer's plate, and a series of brief articles describing the various classes.
This evolved from my original efforts to chronicle the history of the 12. The Museum oftentimes refers inquiries about the 12 my way, and I am thankful they put a link to the 12-1/2 Registry on their site. I would like to merge the 2 sites into 1 at some point (they both use the same database, so it is technically very feasible). The value of having an Internet site is that more people can both learn about their own boat and contribute information to the record. On several occasions we have been able to combine a few discrete pieces of background to identify a boat, which is very satisfying. The more people that know about the site, the greater is the chance that more data can be found.
I have a real interest in the research itself and in turning the gathered data into a tool that people can use to learn about their own vessel. An extremely valuable source of data is the Beverly Yacht Club Yearbooks. They are hard to come by. HMM has quite a few of them, and I have manually keyed in the data from about half of their collection (I hope to go up for the other half sometime this fall). I had almost brokered a deal between the Villanova University Falvey Library and the Beverly Yacht Club in which VU would have electronically scanned the entire colllection and published it on their website at no charge, but the then-Commodore nixed the deal because he didn't like the language in the VU agreement. What a major disappointment. I recently tried to re-surface the deal, but nothing happened and I have now lost my connection with the Falvey Library.
I think that's about it for now in terms of future plans. Anything I can do to drive the visibility of this site improves the chances of harvesting more data. Feel free to suggest any ideas.
-Steve