Social media has become an easy way to keep track life’s milestones. With Facebook’s new Timeline, it’s easier than ever to use social media to write your own history.

A New Brunswick man is taking the concept one step further and is using Facebook to track the history of various cities across Canada, including Saskatoon.

Vintage Saskatoon has over 2,000 followers on Facebook. It’s an online community sharing photos and stories from over 100 years’ worth of prairie history.

The page’s creator, Ryan Gagne, is a marketing vice president who focuses on social media in his work. The vintage pages are a combination of two of his passions: history and social networking.

“When I was young, you’d go to a museum to get history. Now I worry that all those stories and those interesting people and all that history that’s changed a city is being missed by a generation of people that are only online,” Gagne said. “It’s important to let a new generation see it, but also to let them interact with it.”

The online database on the Facebook page is highly interactive. People comment on photos, share their stories, and share their own images as well.

The pictures have become so popular that Gagne’s created a calendar of 12 of the best images. They’ll be for sale soon, and proceeds go to help run the site - several of the images Gagne posts he pays for out of his own pocket by buying postcards and pictures on eBay and other online sites.

Don Kerr is a local historian with plenty of experience with tangible records and archives. While he said he prefers to actually hold history in his hands, he thinks the idea of digital and social record keeping is a great idea.

“It’s easy for me to go to an archive,” Kerr said. “But there are all sorts of people in rural Saskatchewan who it’s not easy for. And now they can.”

Gagne runs several “vintage” pages, most of which have a local partner helping him keep things running. However, in Saskatoon, he’s still looking for a partner to help keep Vintage Saskatoon a well-run community for Saskatoon’s history lovers.