My wife and I are involved in a voluntary local history project that “got out of
hand”.
We began a study of businesses since the inception of our home town. We
collected so many interesting things about people and events, buildings, etc.
that we have ended up collecting anything historical about the village. We are
now constantly being approached for information about ancestors and past
events by people from all over Canada and elsewhere. We can almost always
provide answers to the queries.
Our objective is not to write books about this place, but to create a repository
of historical information which provides easy access to future historians,
families, and other interested parties. Books tend to be selective and too
narrowly focussed. We want this collection to be very inclusive. We also want
it to be in a form that is easily transferable to organizations such as the
historical society, the genealogical society and the museum.
The problem is that we have so much information and no easy way to
recognize connections among pieces of data except our own memories. For
example, we might know that Fred Finkle was on the village council in 1891,
but we might not remember that he was a carpenter, and that he appears in a
photograph of a ball team in 1905.
I have been trying to design a relational database in MS Access to keep this
information, but my vision of this repository has far outstripped my ability to
design and build an application. Many people have suggested Past Perfect as a
good possibility, but I am skeptical because of the cost and because I am not
certain that it will do everything we need.
We have the following items in our collection:
- approximately 8,000 pieces of information on 3x5 cards each with a subject
(person or family name, event, place, thing, idea), and some related
information. Some are cross referenced . being added to constantly
- even more information in hand written notes in about 60 3-ring binders
classified as Businesses, Families, Obituaries, Cemeteries, Churches, etc. To be
entered into a relational database of some type.
- throughout the collection we have many stories which we have garnered
from many sources, and we are especially interested in stories and folklore.
- we have many lists of people, for example I have all public and continuation
school registrations from 1890 to recent times. We have indexed the property
assessment rolls for the early years after incorporation. We have a collection
of obituaries, cememtery records, indexed old newspapers.
We are thinking about indexing early village council meetings.
-about 1500 digital photographs, about 100 hard copy photos, 8,000
- we have many family histories which families have provided or which we have
developed for them. Some digital; some hardcopy.
- it is the family connections that I would really like to maintain so that we
know how the individuals are related, which family they belong to, and how to
distinguish among all of the John Smiths who appear throughout the history.
This is the function that is most difficult to find in existing software. What I
am really looking for, I guess, is a functionality like a family tree software in
which any number of families can be stored within one file, or in other words a
community-wide family tree.
I realize that there are many archival functions required by institutions which I
do not need.
However, I thought I would ask for list members' advice on this. Perhaps you
have suggestions of software which might address most of our requirements
without costing a king's ransom.
Brockest Vodden
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