January 21, 2010
What I do
Even many people who live inside New York don’t know about the public historian system. It dates back to 1919, and requires each municipality (county, city, town, village) to have a person on board whose job it is to preserve the municipality’s history. I am one of 57 county historians, and have been since April 1996. In Yates County the title includes the duties of the Records Management Officer, an official also required of all municipalities by state law, this one passed in 1988. In 1989, when the county’s legislature had to appoint an RMO, I was already working for the historian, whose job was then part-time. They picked me, paid me a little extra to manage all the county’s records, and that was that. I had to make the job up as I went along, and with a lot of help from the people at the State Archives, I think I’ve done a reasonable job — at least as far as paper records are concerned; electronic records are another whole ball game, and so far I have not been able to convey my own sense of urgency to the Powers That Be.
Though it is pretty rare for Historians to do records management, the jobs do mesh quite nicely. As Historian, I get many, many requests for information, most of them from genealogists; and the records are awfully handy. We have a nice research area, with indexes and other aids, many of which can also be used by online researchers who visit the Historian’s website (see previous post).
At present, I am working to get the cemetery readings from the town of Barrington on the site, which will leave only the two big cemeteries in Dundee and Penn Yan. We are scanning and indexing such records as have come our way, including right now George Goundry’s ledger book from 1799-1804 at Hopeton Mill, and the records of the Barrington Baptist Church. Only indexes will go on the site, on account of space constraints; I’d love to put the scanned images up, but we will make copies for people who want them, second best but really not bad.
I hope this week to put up on this blog a page about some research done on a local family. We have at least 12 cubic feet of family files, that contain correspondence back 25 years or so. I’ve done a lot of it myself, as that was my first job for the Historian back in December, 1987: doing genealogical reearch for clients. Those were the days! Now I want to share some of it with you, so stay in touch.
Fran Dumas
Yates County Historian
