With the help of a grant from the Maine Community Foundation, the Fort Fairfield Public Library is preserving more than a century’s worth of local newspapers and yearbooks and making them digitally accessible for free.
The archives of 9 different local newspapers that have served Fort Fairfield are now online and fully searchable, covering a range from 1863 through to 2012, said library director Jennifer Gaenzle.
The more recent years of the town’s current paper, the Fort Fairfield Journal, also will be added in the future, as well as school yearbooks and school newspapers going back to the late 1800s, Gaenzle, said.
“We’re adding more and more each year,” she said. The archives are accessible for free through the town website from any computer with an internet connection.
The preservation and digitization project has been supported by four grants totalling $8,700 from the Maine Community Foundation’s Ruth Reed Mraz Family Memorial Fund.
Gaenzle said that the library works with a company in Iowa, Advance Preservation, that digitizes the materials and hosts them online for the library. The newspapers were already on microfilm and were sent to the company, while some of the yearbooks will need to be scanned by hand in Fort Fairfield and then the digital files of those scans will be sent for digital archiving, Gaenzle said.
“The yearbooks are really showing signs of their age. The earliest yearbooks are too fragile to send,” Gaenzle said. “We‘re looking for volunteers who are available during the day and can help us scan them.”
The Fort Fairfield Public Library is working to digitize the archives of the town’s newspapers and yearbooks, including this July 25, 1917, edition of the Fort Fairfield Review, in a project funded by the Maine Community Foundation. (Courtesy/Fort Fairfield Public Library)
Gaenzle said that the searchable newspaper archives already have been a big hit in the Fort Fairfield community, with people using the archives for family research and to learn more about local history.
“The genealogical aspect has been great. It’s made our lives as workers here. Instead of having to page through page and after page by hand, anybody can [visit] online and search by name,” Gaenzle said.
One individual has been able to verify an old family story that some thought was a myth — about an uncle who died saving another family member from a fire — and another was able to find a birth announcement that helped verify documentation for gaining a passport, Gaenzle said.
“I was inspired by my own genealogical research on my own family,” said Gaenzle, an eastern Pennsylvania native whose family originally hailed from Germany.
“I followed my father’s side back to the 1400s in Germany. But it was so expensive.” With the Fort Fairfield library’s archives, “it was important to me that it stayed free to the public,” she said.
“The more we know about our history and heritage the more we can pass down to our children. And it makes you think about others than just yourself.”
