Town Clerk's digital archive project

PHOTOS BY ROB BENCHLEY

Town Clerk Catherine Stover examines an 1869 map of Nantucket by Rev. F. C. Ewer that was recently given to the town by the City of Cambridge. PHOTOS BY ROB BENCHLEY She is two weeks late.

But when one considers how long Town Clerk Catherine Flanagan Stover worked on digitizing the town's archives her celebration this Friday of National Archivists Month should still be considered well within the bounds set by the Society of American Archivists.

Since 1999, Stover and her staff have been restoring, binding, scanning and compiling town records and archives of all kinds, trying to get them all onto a searchable laser-fiche database so Nantucket citizens and visitors alike can, for their own pleasure or serious personal business, explore the records of the Town of Nantucket dating back three centuries. On Friday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., Stover is holding an open house for people to and see what she has been up to for the last 11 years including peeking inside her office vault and viewing historic town archives and artifacts.

"It's a way to show the people where the money's been going," said Stover of the town- and Community Preservation Committee-funded project. "There have been several people who have come in during the last two months looking for genealogy archives and we haven't been able to do that."

From the vault in the clerk's office is this handwritten account book from the Quaise Alms House for the years 1837 through 1848. PHOTOS BY ROB BENCHLEY For two hours on Nov. 13, Stover and her staff will give tours of the new archiving system and see some of the original documents from which Stover reconstructed this 21st century archive. Records, maps and archives from four town vaults including Stover's in her office, the one in the Board of Selectmen's office, another in the attic of the Town & County building and a fourth one up at Nantucket High School near the Large Group Instruction Room went into the new database.

"We're going to have our original book of plans for the layout of the roads, we have a drawn map showing the four original wind mills and a book showing all the names of

the people accused of being

witches in the 1700s and then a list of them being recused."

Although she has not fi- nalized what artifacts and records will be on display, Stover added that she does plan to show a map of the island recently acquired from the City of Cambridge that is going to be restored, birth certificates from the 1860s and the ballot register for the first year women could vote following the passage of the 19th Amendment in August of 1919. The Town Records Restoration Project, which cost just under $1 million, began in 1999 with $75,000 from the town and since then, CPC has kept it going.

"They [the archives] were all in boxes up in the attic," said Stover. "They hadn't been cleaned. They were all rolled up in document boxes. So now everything has been restored and bound and laser-fiched, so we can do research on a runway dog or a pig and any instance of that happening in the last 300 years. We can click on it and it will come up in a list and then we can print it out or email it." I PHOTOS BY ROB BENCHLEY