I've been a follower of myArmoury for a couple of years now. Whenever I get a chance to follow the topics I find interesting info and the international response to my querries has been most helpful. That got me wondering how did myArmoury come to be and got such a wide following. From the locations of the "moderator" members I assume it started in the USA midwest (?). I find this very interesting since there is generally much more interest in Viking, Medieval, etc. times in Europe where also there are many more collectors, dealers, etc. of armour artefacts. Yet one of the (if not "THE") most popular armour sites is a USA one! :D I thought it would be fun for us relative newcommers to learn more.

If there is a link on the site addressing this I obviously missed it - sorry!

Jan,
Nathan can fill in more details than me, but here's what I recall. :) Nathan, from the US West Coast, discovered years ago that his collection had outgrown his ability to display it. Since designing websites is among his skills, he put together a website to do what he couldn't do at home: display his collection in one place. So the earliest incarnation of this site was literally Nathan's armoury. :) The collection galleries are therefore the part of the site closest to the original purpose.

Some of the original players on what's become myArmoury met on Swordforum in the late 1990s: Nathan, Patrick Kelly, Björn Hellqvist and some others. SFI briefly had a magazine that featured articles and reviews; it lasted 4 editions. A number of the early contributors to myArmoury were authors for SFI's early efforts.

SFI went through a turbulent period and some of those folks and others left SFI for a variety of reasons. Nathan expanded his website to include some articles and reviews that some of those guys had written.

In August 2003, the forums were added as well as the photo albums. We went through a period of fantastic growth where we published articles and/or reviews every 2 weeks. That was not sustainable, but we still boast the highest number of arms and armour-related articles and reviews of any similar site on the net: 144 feature articles, 224 hands-on reviews, and 241 collection gallery pages. We have 61 wonderful people who comprise our ranks of volunteer authors.

:)