The Guardians of History

Last week I attended a meeting of the local historical society. There was a wonderful meal followed by a talk by a local historian about a park in the area. When he stood up to talk, and I saw his topic was a park I'd never heard of much less been to, I immediately began to think of how bored I would be. I was delighted to be proven wrong on that account; I hardly noticed that an hour had passed before he finished, and everyone else in attendance seemed to have enjoyed it as well. For many, the history of the park, which started out as a trolley park, must have brought back memories of their youth. At least one person talked about how their class always went to the park at the end of the school year, and how they looked forward to the rides and the experience.

Some of the readers may remember that my first professional job was working as a genealogy reference librarian, overseeing a collection of local history and genealogy resources at the Uniontown (PA) Public Library. While I was there, I encountered a number of people working on local histories, and they were always rather interesting people writing on the most esoteric of topics. The work was lengthy and surely quite tedious at times, but that never stopped them. The man who presented on the park, for instance, worked on his book for three years, drawing together stories from people who remembered the park, old photographs, stories from newspapers and even added in old tickets to the park that a woman in her nineties had kept all these years. But there were many others; I remember the woman who was working on a history of the local glassworks. There was a man who retired from the local paper and was investigating the Homestead Strike (and several other related topics) in the microfilmed newspaper collection. There were also plenty of people I never met who had spent countless hours compiling and collecting--the people who volunteered their time to create books with nothing more than transcribed lists of headstones in graveyards, lists which became all the more important as the gravestones themselves eroded into illegibility. 

When you talk to any of these people, their passion really shines through. I think it must be nearly impossible to spend endless hours combing through microfilm and old photos of your own volition and not be passionate about the topic, whatever it is. While there are surely plenty of people who wouldn't find their work interesting, for me they are performing a great service to society. These people are the guardians of history, recording and compiling parts of our world that would otherwise so easily disappear forever from human memory. It is these sorts of people, the quiet preservers, to whom we owe a great debt of gratitude, from the archivists and librarians who diligently work to digitize and preserve unique records reaching the end of their natural life, to the compilers who work to label photographs and ephemera before all knowledge of their context is gone. How much knowledge has been lost because records disappeared before they could be captured and preserved, and yet how much remains within our grasp because of the work that these relative few carry out?