Accessing and Making Local History

I gave a presentation at a regular meeting of the Afton Historical Society this past week entitled, "Accessing and Making Local History."

For the first part of my talk, I shared two library projects that we started this year to better share local history; creating digital archives of ACS artifacts, and creating podcasts from Historical Society documents. We played our pilot podcast,"Afton Begins to Bustle" off of an iPod Shuffle to illustrate how our local history could easily be incorporated into a "playlist." Society members were also interested in the hardware and process that we used for our digital archiving as they have been investigating that route for their holdings ( I also learned that they have compiled a database of over 2000 artifacts in their collection! We agreed to talk further to see how we might be able to make that resource available for our students and community.).

For the second part of my presentation, I shared examples of how we ourselves continue to "make" history at a local level. To illustrate the capacity of the Internet to facilitate this, I told them about my brother's investigative pursuit of compiling the personal history of my Dad's aviation experience in WWII; combining research strategies, hard work, and patience to ultimately piece together information and as well as an entire community of veterans who had lost track of each other; a history of his own making,

In the same vein, I read a selection of my own poems centered on our historic and personal attachment to our homestead; reminding them that the journals, diaries, poetry and photographs that we create for ourselves are the same documents that we will rely on to tell us about the "past" and so are no less valuable than the ones in their collection.

As always, it was apparent that there are many valuable projects to be forged between ACS and the AHS.