Ford is celebrating two anniversaries this month.
The company turns 122 years old on June 16, 2025. On that same date, Ford Archivist Ted Ryan will be celebrating the third birthday of the Ford Heritage site, an online repository of historic material.
Ryan says it’s quadrupled in size over those three years.
“More than 20 thousand items, up from a measly five thousand three years ago.”
It's at www.fordheritagevault.com.
The site contains photos of most ford vehicles over the years, classic brochures, Ford advertisements. They are adding more as they turn three years old.
“We’re excited to announce that beginning on the 16th, you’ll be able to get press releases of the introductions of most of our famous models, and the generations of those models as well, and we’re also adding images of the Ford Heritage Fleet,” says Ryan.
The site is used by historians, students, journalists and people who love cars. But, it’s not always about the cars. They have included a publication called “The Ford Times”, a classic lifestyle magazine that was published for much of the 10th century. There was a lot about cars, but also a lot of other items that were popular in magazines of that era.
“There was one month that one of the leading searches was ‘Ford Times Recipes.” says Ryan. “People weren’t coming looking for Mustangs on that. They had heard from some of the social media. People hear about it, and go looking on the site for different content.”
But a lot of people are looking for Mustangs on the site, as well as other classic and current Ford products. One month, an unusually high number of searches came from Finland. It turns out members of a Mustang club in Finland heard about the site, and interest grew by word of mouth.
Ryan says he expected the site to be popular when it debuted. But, typically visits to sites like this fall off as time goes by. Ryan says that hasn’t happened.
“We have held steady at between 1.2 and 1.5 million searches per month, and we’ve had over ten million downloads from the site in the three years it’s been in existence.”
There is a lot more to add. Ryan would like to see photos and bios of all of the Ford top executives over the years. There should be material on Ford affiliates like Philco. Ford archives has a fairly small staff, but they are working to identify and include appropriate material. Ryan says they are also saving material on today’s vehicles to go into the site in the future.
“The long term goal is it will be the repository for Ford historical materials.”