New Work Keeps Old News Alive
But the papers, resting on massive shelves in the state library attic, are disintegrating. Beneath a stack of Stonington Mirrors and Mystic Journals from 1921, for example, is a pile of yellowed, brittle flakes, pieces of the paper that broke off and have fallen to the floor.
“Who knows what has crumbled away onto the floor, what pieces of text, whose obituary?” asked Jane F. Cullinane, microfilming coordinator of the library’s Connecticut Newspaper Project. “What pieces of news about what was going on in town have crumbled away?”
Her project is an attempt to preserve these newspapers before they collapse into confetti.
“This is a vital thing in the preservation of our memory as a state and as a people,” said James O. Robertson, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Connecticut.
Bonnie Linck, newspaper librarian at the state library’s history and genealogy department, said 6,000 to 8,000 people a year visit the department, and most use old newspapers in their research.
“They are very popular,” she said.
Robertson, co-author with his wife, Janet C. Robertson, of “All Our Yesterdays” and author of other historical works, has used newspapers throughout his career. “They give you a chronicle of what is happening day to day in whatever community the newspaper serves,” he said. “Those things are totally lost if the newspaper is lost.”
In researching “All Our Yesterdays,” which traced the history of a family in Hampton, the Robertsons came upon a stumbling block.
“We did not know when one of the major characters had died or in what circumstances, and we had no idea how he was publicly viewed — until we found a wonderful obit,” he said.
Obituaries and social news items are often used to fill out a genealogist’s knowledge of a family’s history. A historian might use anything from advertisements to general news columns.
“You won’t find what was the debate before the new school was built in 1875 in the town records,” Cullinane said. “The town records will show the money was allocated and a school was built. But the great debate that raged about whether we should use this land or that land . . . those things are in the newspaper.”
The preservation project began with a five- year effort to identify all the newspapers that have been published in Connecticut and determine which institutions or individuals had copies of any of them.
That work identified 2,071 different newspapers published in the state since 1755. Not a single copy can be found of 220 of them. Of the 1,851 newspapers that were found, in most cases there are many issues missing, and most existing copies have not been microfilmed, the process thought best for long-term preservation.
Once the identification effort was finished, Cullinane’s group, with the assistance of an advisory committee of historians, genealogists and newspaper representatives, began selecting newspapers to microfilm. The project offices at the state library include a room where papers are prepared for microfilming, a labor-intensive process that can include ironing the old newspapers.
The first phase — the job of microfilming 352,500 pages — should be completed next month. That phase included microfilming the Deep River New Era, the Farmington Valley Herald, the Norwich Bulletin, the Woodbury Reporter, the Stafford Press and the Connecticut Western News. Work on the New Britain Herald has just begun, starting with its first issue in 1880, when it began as a weekly.
Cullinane is awaiting word on a $688,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities before beginning a second phase. The state would spend $305,000 to microfilm another 918,000 newspaper pages by 2001.
Cullinane said the next batch would probably include some ethnic newspapers. There are 87 titles on a list that includes newspapers published for African American communities.
One African American paper, The Hartford Chronicle, was published in the 1940s. Some copies are known to exist and can be microfilmed, but there are many missing editions. Of an earlier African American newspaper, the Hartford Herald, no copies are known to exist. In fact, the project knows of the paper only because it was mentioned in another newspaper, the Hartford Evening Post, which reported that it was first published on April 27, 1918.
Among the ethnic papers were La Verita, an Italian-language paper published in Waterbury for several decades in the early 20th century, and The Hartforder Herold, a German language paper published in Hartford in the late 19th and early 20th century. Only one copy of the Herold is known to exist. There also were papers published in Spanish, Swedish, Hungarian, Polish, French and Russian.
Cullinane said she hopes that people with private collections will come forward and allow their copies to be microfilmed.
“The ethnic and special-group newspapers, like the Hartford Herald, have been especially frustrating to find,” she said.
The Connecticut project is part of the U.S. Newspaper Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities. So far, the endowment has spent $38 million in 50 states, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the District of Columbia to microfilm 57 million pages of newsprint.
“All of the newspapers are going to be entered into a database,” said Jim Turner, a spokesman for the endowment. “They are little time capsules, these newspapers.”
