A naval officer from yesteryear. Courtesy Sea Your History.

A new breed of museum has opened to celebrate 100 years of life in the Senior Service.

The Sea Your History Project, a museum in website format, details life in the Royal Navy and Royal Marines. The Heritage Lottery Fund has contributed £660,000 towards the scheme.

Researchers over the past 13 months have fished through archives and compiled 100 years of naval history in photographs, letters and diaries. The material has been digitised for the website. The finished site will have 15,000 items, few of which have been seen in public before.

Sea Your History - a look at the homepage. Courtesy Sea Your History.

“This is the way museums are going," said Royal Navy Museum Director Colin White. "For an exhibition on the Falklands, you might get 100,000 people visiting; online you might get that number in a day.”

The Royal Naval Museum, Royal Navy Submarine Museum, Royal Marines Museum and the Fleet Air Arm Museum have all contributed to making the poignant journey through the last decade, which has been described as the Senior Service’s ‘most challenging.’

The choice of naval material is immense; The Royal Marines Museum has two million photographs alone.

Helen Gibbons, Sea Your History Project Manager, added: “The choice of what to leave in and out has been very difficult – fortunately we’ve been helped by the other naval museums and the Fleet Photographic Unit.”

That website address again: www.seayourhistory.org.uk/