Local historical societies have been around for years. They vary in size and scope. Some have full-time employees with facilities that maintain regular hours. Others are smaller, operated by all-volunteer staff, and are seldom open to the public without an appointment.
Cities the size of Bridgeport and Danbury have organizations dedicated to documenting and sharing local history that operate their own museums and maintain repositories packed with thousands of photographs, manuscript items, periodicals and newspaper clipping files. Manned by a paid staff, they are usually open on a regular basis with posted hours. These organizations can be visited either by appointment, or often, even on a walk-in basis. Staff members can often provide answers to members of the community via email or make themselves available to provide assistance for those who wish to visit to conduct their own research.
Smaller communities such as Easton and Redding have much smaller facilities operated by volunteers who seldom, if ever, work regular hours. Some, like Easton, provide dedicated researchers who can answer inquiries or initiate searches within hours of being contacted. Others provide only sporadic replies and have limited abilities to fully search their archives for answers. Two organizations with similar sized archives may provide very different results when posed with similar questions. The reason: knowledgeable staff and well organized, searchable archives. Without both, many smaller historical societies are little more than storage facilities.
The Historical Society of Easton turned fifty in 2018. Curator Elizabeth Boyce, and I, as the new Director of Research, came on board within a few days of each other. The Society’s archives were stored in closets, cabinets, storage boxes and file drawers. Except for a few of the file drawers, nothing was organized in such a manner that it could be easily found or accessed. It took less than a half a day perusing the various nooks and crannies of our newly adopted office to come to the mutual conclusion that conducting any meaningful research in that space was going to be an exercise in futility. In addition, the available space was so limited that it was going to be most unlikely that we could create an easily searchable archive in the physical sense.
We both realized what we would need to do. Digitize what was already there and create folders that would be searchable going forward. If that sounds like a simple solution, it is not.
Like most historical societies, we had a rather large cache of old journals and ledgers – some dating back to the late 18th century when the parish of North Fairfield was still in its infancy. Delicate beyond belief, most of these were in no condition to be studied at length in their then current condition. Scanning them and putting them into a digital format was the only solution. Having it done professionally would have cost anywhere from a few hundred to in excess of a thousand dollars per unit. In one cabinet alone, we counted more than fifty.
We found multiple photo collections. Some were labeled, most were not. Keeping them loose was not an option. Cataloging them in albums could be done, but having the identifiers on the reverse side would mean having only one photo per sleeve, taking up too much valuable space. Digitizing each one and then providing even a limited number of metadata would make each photo searchable by subject matter and/or date. By simply typing in the words “Staples Academy” one could retrieve every single image the Society had in its collection of our most famous pre-1800 institution. The added bonus of digitalization was the almost instant ability to add another image to the collection without the immediate need to add the original to an already bulging album. It would also allow us to scan a photo that someone else possessed but didn’t want to physically donate to the Society.
Historical documents come in all sizes and shapes. Digitizing them allows them to be stored in uniform electronic files that when opened on a computer screen can be enlarged to make them easier to read and study. This is incredibly handy when it comes to deciphering a two-hundred-year-old deed written in cursive with a quill pen. Faded inks, yellowed, and darkened paper can be adjusted during the digitization process to appear crisper, cleaner, and even brighter than the original.
By now, you get the picture. What we needed to do was clear. Getting it accomplished would be the issue. We would need a rather large array of specialized scanners, most particularly, a full book scanner that could photograph both pages of an open book without damaging the spine. In the fall of 2018, the Society had one inexpensive, very limited capability, flat-bed scanner that was part of an all-in-one scanner/fax/copier/printer.
At first, we used our own equipment. Luckily for the Society, we both had well-equipped home offices, as we were both already avid researchers and writers. It took almost two years of fund raising and grant writing before we were ready to work in the office at the Historical Society. Today, five and a half years later, our office looks like the modern technical workplace it has become. We are fully capable of digitizing just about anything. We still require a large frame to handle photographing large maps and full-sized blueprints, but that should be here and set up sometime within the next month or so.
That said, we are still only about half-way through completing the entire collection. The photos are complete, and many are now online at our website. Our entire historic house inventory has been digitized and is also online for viewing. More than half the journals have been done. Town reports dating back as far as the first decade of the 20th century are partially finished, and this year with the help of either a student intern or another one of our board members, we hope to have them all completed and online.
In Easton, we maintain an active website where we periodically add additional historical information and photographs. Historical Society of Easton Connecticut – Archive Preservation and Research Center (historicalsocietyofeastonct.org). This site is already populated with links to the completely digitized copy of the historical records of the Congregational Church, Easton’s Historical Resources Inventory, Nye’s 1975 map of Union Cemetery, and over a half dozen galleries that contain hundreds of historical photographs. The ultimate goal is to have that website populated with enough material for most people to do a fair amount of research on their own without ever leaving the comfort of their own home. We will still be available to help with the more difficult searches, but a good deal of those easier to research questions will be answered through an online search. Our constantly updated Facebook page keeps people abreast of our continuing efforts to serve the community and provide educational programs that highlight the past. (1) Facebook
In Redding, where Brent Colley and I serve as the town’s two officially appointed Town Historians, we are taking a different approach. Together, we recently co-founded the Redding CT History Project. An all-digital collection of nearly 300 years’ worth of Redding history. With the help of over a half-dozen other Redding historical academia, we have amassed nearly 3,000 historical files, documents, and photographs; created a digital archive; and have the ability to answer inquiries usually within a few hours after we receive them.
Connected to multiple subscription services, we can quickly answer genealogical questions or locate newspaper and periodical articles from the past that relate to the town and its historical residents. With nearly a dozen digital maps (1856-1964) in our collection – all that list the residents in the year in which they were created, we can put names to the people who lived in some of our most historically important houses. We have the town’s official Historical Resources Inventory already downloaded onto our computers. The Charles R. Hale Collection of Cemetery Inscriptions – we have it. Charles Todd Burr’s “The History of Redding, Connecticut” – we have both the 1880 and 1906 editions, digitized and searchable right at our fingertips.
With our recent creation of a dedicated Facebook page, the Redding CT History Project features regular posts with historical photographs or scans of documents that are typically accompanied by between 100 and 300 words of text that explain the historical significance of the images. Redding CT History Project | Facebook. The goal is to share the history of the area in a manner that is both informative and entertaining.
While the digital world is not meant to replace the traditional historical society’s old one room schoolhouse or antique farmstead exhibits, it does provide a way to experience and learn about our past without the need to leave the home or office.
