Vast ‘number of categories’ help required!!!

Hi,

A client of mine is looking to publish a website which chronicles a small seaside town right back to the early 1800’s. The problem is categorisation. Every year will contain every date within that year. Some of the daily entries are quite large, say 500 words, maybe more.

As you can appreciate, this is going to be a HUGE website. I recommended WordPress due to its ease of use and the fact it has built-in contributor account support which is absolutely spot on for my clients needs.

Now, can any of you wise guys come up with a solution that makes it intuitive for users and contributors? So far we’ve discovered the timestamp feature only goes back to 1969 so it looks as though pages or categories are the only obvious solution unless I’m missing something obvious. With nearly 200 years and daily entries how do we group all this so it’s searchable by day, month and year?

Has anyone been through this sort of level of categorisation before?

Thanks for any help anyone gives on the subject.