Our program will be a bit of a hybrid.  We’ll be showing a video of a program by Jack MacKeen on researching family history.    After this 30-minute video presentation, Dave Griffin and Leonard Palmer will demonstrate current computer tools and websites that you can use to research and document your family history on both PCs and Macs.

Please stay afterwards for friendly chit-chat and (perhaps*) light refreshments.

*Nobody signed up to provide snacks in June, so I’m deciding how nice I’m going to be…

Here are some photos (courtesy of Peg Brown):

Maynard’s cane was officially retired in 1981 after being lost for over 50 years.  In 1999 Paul Boothroyd  of the Maynard Historical Society restarted the tradition, awarding a certificate in place of the cane.

http://www.keene.edu/newsevents/default.cfm?Type=NewsDetail&News_ID=2308

“When a contractor demolishing a Nelson, N.H., barn came across a 35mm Monarch projector and seven reels of film, he contacted the Keene State College Film Society. They determined that his find included what appears to be the only surviving copy ofWhen Lincoln Paid, a film starring and directed by movie pioneer Francis Ford, the older brother of famed director John Ford.”

You can read more about this and see some clips of the movie by at the Keene State College site.

Light refreshments will be served at the end of the meeting. The meeting is open to the public and is handicapped accessible. A suggested donation of $5 by non-church members is appreciated. For further information contact Peggy Brown: 978-897-1664 or email seekr2@comcast.net

For more information on the Museum of Russian Icons in Clinton, please visit their web site:  http://www.museumofrussianicons.org/

If you don’t know what a Russian Icon is or want to learn more about them, Wikipedia has a short introduction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_icons

For those who don’t know what I’m yabbering about, the documents we are making available online are “scanned” pages, essentially pictures of each page all bound together in a single file (the PDF file). Your computer only knows that there are umpteen of these images (which it calls pages) but nothing else. The fact that there is text on them or not is irrelevant. But with some extra work we can instruct a program to “read” these pages and try to locate the text on it and turn it into words that the computer can understand. This is a task that in recent years has become pretty reliable for printed materials (handwritten work or poorly typed pages is typically unusable). This is what we did to the 1921 Gutteridge PDF file and now you can search for words, names, etc. within it — not just flip through pages. The process is far from perfect, but we’re seeing a high enough level of accuracy to make it available to the public. This makes the file much more useful for research.

So, for anyone who downloaded the book prior to today (18-Mar-2010) please download it again to get the updated version with the searchable text:

History of Maynard – 1921 – WIlliam Gutteridge

Longfellow’s Wayside Inn is a nationally recognized Massachusetts Historic Landmark, licensed as an Inn and tavern in 1716 and continues today to provide hospitality services along the former Boston Post Road.

Preview Party and Reception May 14, 6:30pm to 9pm $125 by advance registration and $150 at the door

General admission $10 Saturday, May 15 and Sunday, May 16 10am to 5pm

A 501(c)3 not-for-profit 120-acre historic site on the National Register of Historic Places, the Wayside Inn offers rich educational public programming, with trained interpreters detailing a variety of colonial customs at several historic building locations. The village campus was originally conceived by former property owner Henry Ford, and is generally recognized as the first living-history museum in the United States. The Wayside Inn remains dedicated to the preservation and stewardship of its open campus, as well as the interpretation and operation of the old Howe Tavern; represented today by the multi-room facility known as the Wayside Inn.

In order to ensure the longevity of this landmark property we need your help. Please consider a sponsorship at any level, or attend the opening night reception to preview some of the most extraordinary antiques on the market while enjoying fine food and drink in a grand canopy tent housing 44 top-notch dealers.

For sponsor information and preview tickets please contact Kathy Quinton, Director of Sales , (978) 443-1776 x102 or sales@wayside.org. Sponsor press kits are available at www.wayside.org/event/wayside-inn-antiques-show.

Presenting Sponsor: SKINNER, INC. Auctioneers and Appraisers of Antiques and Fine art

Sponsorships range from $10,000 (Preview Party Sponsor) to $500 (Bronze) and Show Catalog Advertising ($250).

General Admission Preview Tickets for 6:30 Admission
• $125 pre-purchase • $150 at the door
Preview Party tickets are transferable and are good for admission all three show days. Sponsors are allowed early-admission to Preview Party, beginning at 5:30pm. General Admission to Preview Party begins at 6:30pm. Advertising rates include ad setup.

Wayside Antiques Show Insert (pdf file)

Wayside Inn Antiques Show Sponsor and Preview Info (pdf file)

After completing that project we sought a sacrificial copy of the 1971 history of the town so we could make that important document available to everyone.  Roy Helander was kind enough to donate one of his paperback copies and it sat in my “to do” box for several months — it’s a hefty book and it would take some time.  I needed a couple of pages scanned for an upcoming presentation, so today seemed like a good time to attack this project.   Armed with a microplane rasp I removed the adhesive binding and then carefully worked the pages off the staples that held the book together.  It was scanned at 200 pixels/inch – which makes for a nice file size and is reportedly a good resolution for OCR (optical character recognition).  I processed the file with Adobe Acrobat’ s OCR and it cranked away for a few hours. The results were pretty good (as OCR goes)!  So the text of this book is also searchable (I wouldn’t trust it 100%, but my random sampling implies that it works pretty well for casual searches.)

So here we are in February 2010 and the second major history of Maynard is now available on any computer in the world.  (I wonder if the 3rd one will even make it to paper?)

If you look at the book the last page is 234, but due to the way it was published pages with photographs weren’t numbers.  The actual page count is 366, not counting the cover pages.  So this is a substantial work and full of wonderful details about Maynard.  It is the current bible for town history buffs and we hope you will take advantage of this electronic copy.

You can download it from the Maynard Historical Society web site.  The file is just under 100 megabytes:

The History of Maynard, Massachusetts 1871-1971 (pdf, 95MB – right-click to download)

The book was published by the Maynard Historical Commission and encapsulates the work of numerous people, many in the Maynard Historical Society, in anticipation of Maynard’s Centennial celebration.  1000 copies were printed (400 hard-bound and 600 soft-bound).

February’s program will be on the Maynard Dramatic Club. Roy Helander, who was a thespian in the club for many years, will talk about the history of the club, which started in 1936 and produced plays through the 1970s. We hope a few other past members of the club along with some former audience members will help share some memories of this popular arts organization.

As always our meetings are open to the public and light refreshments are usually served after the meeting along with some time for socializing. We hope to see you there.

Our March 2010 program (March 22) somewhat continues the theme of February’s program only we’ll go wide instead of deep. In March, Dave Griffin and Paul Boothroyd will cover the history of many of Maynard’s well-known and not so well-known clubs and societies. Before radio and television anchored people into their living rooms every night, people actually went out and socialized with each other. Starting with the Iola Lodge of Good Templars in 1866, dozens upon dozens of clubs and societies sprang up along the streets of Maynard. While organizations like the Knights of Columbus, Masons and Elks are still known today, many more are shrouded in history: Eagles, Odd Fellows, Nashoba Tribe, Knights of Pythias, Loyal Order of Moose, Maynard Cricket Association, and the D.Y.W.Y.K. Club to name a few (and if you want to know what those initials stood for, come to the meeting!)