DOCUMENTING LOCAL HISTORY
Organizing, Documenting, Validating, and Promoting Local History and Genealogy

Contact Information	Speaker Registry	Event Calendar	Individual Articles	Documenting History	Newsletter Archives	Audio Interviews	Nonprofit Management

This Branch Links to These Areas of Work in Local History

Links from this Page (and explaining the links mapped above):

Organizing Yourself: Methods to keep track of people, documents, photographs, and artifacts through scrapbooking, spread sheets, or databases, and how best to input all this data.

Working with Your Contacts : Identifying people who can provide you with historical information from the Northern Catskills and ways to interview them to interpret and confirm oral history.

Working with Your Documents : Hints on the preservation of papers, newspapers, and letters, elimination of musty odors, and forthcoming articles on digitization of book content, optical book recognition, and proofreading of re-keyed letters and other handwritten documents.

Working with Your Pictures ; Analysis of photographic file formats, the differences between pixels and dots per inch, techniques to quickly scan and store pictures for most future use, guidelines for photoshopping, and preservation of art.

Working with Your Artifacts : Information for storing and preserving artifacts, with special information on textiles and book covers (book content is dealt with under documents).

Developing an Article : Guidelines for the scope and content of a newsworthy article on local history, the physical requirements of the article, and the use and handling of art for that work.

Genealogy : Recommendations for online genealogical resources, a directory of formats in popular genealogy applications, and examples of genealogical links in the area.

Validation of Your Work : This page is under construction

Publishing & Presentations : Information on copyright and fair use, hints for creating a newsletter, and scrapbooking. Forthcoming titles include the development of a presentation, hints on handling mailing costs, and the publication of bulletins and posters.

Using Local History in K-12 : The use of a one-room school with the today's students, and forthcoming topics include the use of local history topics in the art classroom, teaching to the NYS requirement on local history, research techniques, journalism course, and quilts.

Courses and Support

Established in 1971, the Upstate History Alliance is a nonprofit service organization which provides support, advice and training to historical societies, museums, historians, archivists, and other heritage organization in New York State. By providing resources, training and expertise to New York's heritage organizations and museums, the Upstate History Alliance strengthens their capacity to better serve their communities and meet their institutional missions. Stephanie Lehner, Program Coordinator.