EVERETT — An effort to preserve local history is under way around Snohomish County.
The historical societies of Monroe and Granite Fallsare among the groups that are digitizing old newspapers into searchable archives and making them available online.
“It’s become the thing to do around here,” said Chris Bee, a Monroe volunteer.
Bee has been working since 2012 to get some 30,000 pages of old Monroe newspapers online. She estimates the project will cost $50,000.
The historical society has copies of most of the city’s newspapers from 1899 to today. Copies of the Monroe Monitor are saved as they hit the newsstand. People have donated older newspapers from their collections.
“Evidently, the old timers saved everything,” Bee said. “So we’ve had this wonderful, rich resource available.”
The historical society is about a third of the way through digitizing papers from 1899 to 1979. Bee and another volunteer, Gary Brooks, log hundreds of hours working on the project each year.
“We think it’s important to preserve our local history,” Bee said. “I personally feel this is the most important service we provide.”
The historical society in Granite Falls has been working on digitizing records for about 10 years, volunteer Fred Cruger said. It took hundreds of hours to scan in photos and documents. Special software allows the society to digitize old maps and georeference them by overlaying the maps onto current property lines and aerial photos.
After processing the photos and maps, the society found itself with thousands of newspapers, “all turning brittle in their inevitable march toward a destiny of fire-starter or mouse-nest,” according to Cruger. The organization sent its papers to be processed by Small Town Papers, a company that specializes in creating searchable digital databases out of old print products. It’s the same company the Monroe society and other Snohomish County groups are using.
“It takes old maps and newspapers and transforms them from basically waste paper into something that’s searchable and really useful,” Cruger said.
Now, the society is using the information to create cyber-tours, where people can get historical photos and information on their mobile device while walking around the same sites today. There are currently tours for Granite Falls, the Mountain Loop Highway, Snohomish and aviation highlights in Everett and Arlington.
The newspapers from Monroe and Granite Falls are searchable online by names, dates and keywords.
Monroe’s newspapers are available at mhs.stparchive.com and Granite Falls’ can be found at gfp.stparchive.com.
“We’ve found this extremely helpful with our work at the museum,” Bee said.
In addition to making the content available online, Small Town Papers sends an external hard drive with the page files on it.
Both Monroe and Granite Falls have received Snohomish County Community Heritage Preservation grants to help with their projects. In 2014, Monroe got $6,000 from the county and spent another $8,000 of the historical society’s money. The group hopes to get more resources to digitize recent papers, from the 1980s to the present.
The county has awarded a total of $92,419 in heritage grants in the last two years. Of that, $30,075 went toward newspaper digitization projects.
Other historical groups in Snohomish County are working on similar efforts or hope to start one soon.
The Marysville Historical Society has completed digitization of its newspapers from 1891 to 1911 but they are not yet available online, said Karen Burkhart, a volunteer board member.
“Beyond that, we’re working as time and money permits,” she said.
The group is currently funneling resources into moving the museum to a new building on Armar Road near Jennings Park. In the future, she said, preserving the decaying historical newspapers and making them available online may become more of a priority.
The Stillaguamish Valley Genealogical Society also hopes to digitize some of its records, but doesn’t yet have enough time, money or people to handle the work, spokeswoman Karen Stroschein said.
“We’ve got the idea of doing it in our mind, just not the workforce to do it,” she said. “It’s not for lack of necessity, it’s just lack of spare (volunteers) to throw at the project.”
The society has been busy promoting its Northwest Genealogy Conference, months in advance of the August event that draws hundreds of people from around the country. The conference is about sharing research, ideas and resources, Stroschein said. Getting records online is another important way to accomplish that mission.
“We use online records all the time,” she said. “We definitely see the value in this.”
Amy Nile: 425-339-3192; anile@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @AmyNileReports
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