In Capital Region, young people joining ranks of municipal historians

Fulton County Historian Samantha Hall-Saladino talks about her efforts to sort and organize the boxes of records and documents dropped off regularly to her office in Johnstown.

Under the Great Sacandaga Lake are the remains of the towns that it flooded in 1930, sand-covered foundations exposed when the water levels fall low enough.

As a kid growing up in Northville, Lauren Roberts would venture out at those times to explore the ruins and pick things out of the sand. Now, at age 33, having worked with archaeologists and earned a master’s degree in public history, she’s much better at identifying those artifacts.

“It always fascinated me when the water went down and you could see all the foundations,” she said.

Roberts has been the Saratoga County historian since 2009. She began her career as a municipal historian at age 25 in the town of Day.

“In the beginning, you do get people who are skeptical because you’re so young,” she said. “I would say that’s the biggest comment I get, is, ‘You’re too young to be a historian.’”

If she’s too young to be a historian, so is Eddie Watt, 25, recently appointed historian in the town of Palatine. And Samantha Hall-Saladino, 29, historian for Fulton County. And certainly Abby Cretser, 22, deputy town historian in Ephratah.

Roberts sees this happening across the state — people in their 20s and 30s entering the field of public history as village, town and county historians. When they get together at annual meetings, they talk about things like how they’re using social media and developments in technology for digitizing old records.

“I think people will see more of it and as people see more of that, there will be less of a stigma,” she said. “Being young doesn’t put you at a disadvantage in being a historian.”

In the basement of the Fulton County office building in Johnstown, Hall-Saladino sits at a computer beneath an old map of the county. Two walls of the room are covered in shelves filled with boxes of yellowing documents, thick old binders and scrapbooks and boxes of old photos.

When she was in fourth grade, her father took her on a trip around the region with a Polaroid camera, snapping photos at historic sites that she later pinned to a map with brief historical descriptions — her first exhibit. It’s still around, she said, framed in her aunt’s house.

When the position of Fulton County historian opened in 2013, she applied before it was even posted.

“I love Fulton County history. It’s the first history I ever learned,” she said. “And to me it’s really important for people to know that their stories and their memories of growing up in the community are important to our history — because nobody else anywhere is going to have the exact same story.”

Like most municipal historians, she works part time, 10 hours a week, while working full time elsewhere. She’s also the education director at the Shaker Heritage Society in Albany.

But she’s hoping that will change, and she has reason to hope. More and more municipal historians are moving from part-time to full-time positions, Roberts said, as community leaders recognize the importance of the role and look to tap local history for tourism and development.

“A lot of people leave Fulton County,” Hall-Saladino said. “They go away to school and they leave and they don’t come back. So you have to give them a reason to stay here, because we need them.”

Her great-grandparents lived and worked in Gloversville in the mid-20th century when the glove industry was booming. Her grandfather worked in a hotel in downtown Gloversville. Tracing that personal history has been a big part of her interest in the history of the county.

“You walk down the street in Gloversville and you can imagine how amazing it must have been,” she said. “And a lot of that is gone now.”

But it’s alive, at least historically, in the memories of residents who lived through it.

In Palatine, that’s where Eddie Watt sees some of his most important work: collecting and preserving the living history of the town, and then making it accessible to the general public.

Just two months into the job, he’s working on a project to take a “cross-section” of town residents, gathering what they know of the houses they live in, whether they’ve been there for six months or 50 years.

He’s also hoping to put together a historic tour for the Canajoharie Central School District.

“We still have a good number of people who remember being about my age or a little younger and remember seeing [President John F.] Kennedy walking down the street shaking people’s hands,” he said. “It’s things like that I think are really important.”

Like Hall-Saladino, he believes that history is more tangible, and more useful, than names on paper and books in a library — it’s as much of a resource in a community, he said, as the businesses or the quality of the school district.

“For me, I think, and perhaps I could say the same for other young historians, the way it can be moved forward is to take the digital age and use it as a medium to really broadcast what we have to offer.”

Roberts has found that social media can also be a more powerful research tool than any historian of the past generation could likely have imagined. She can take an old photo she knows little about, post it online, and access the memories of thousands of followers to help make identifications.

For people Watt’s age, social media is not a fad or a buzzword, it’s practically a utility. That they’re bringing their research and projects to life on Facebook and Twitter, sharing photos and historical revelations with the public, is hardly remarkable — for them.

But, as Hall-Saladino said, many older municipal historians do not even use email.

“A lot of them have lived in the places where they’re serving and have been there for many years, so they have the experience and the knowledge,” she said. “So I think the younger historians can definitely learn from that. But I feel a lot of the younger people coming into this position have the energy to go out and try new things.”

As Watt put it, “it would take a lifetime to catch up” to the historians that came before him — but he’s getting an early start.

From the beginning, Watt has gravitated toward what Roberts identifies as public history, which is just what it sounds like: bringing history to the public, not keeping it in research papers.

Before he became town historian this year, he found himself giving tours of Palatine to college friends when they came to visit. His tours were so good that he began getting requests from both visitors and locals. He’s got several lined up once the warm weather sets in.

He started doing them, he said, to give something back to the community. He doesn’t have the money to make any major investments, he said, or the talent for something like public art. “But I have a love of history,” he said. So that’s what he gave.

Not far away, in the town of Ephratah, 22-year-old Abby Cretser is following in the footsteps of her great aunt, Evelyn Fraiser, the town historian.

When she was 18, Cretser helped her aunt clean, sort, organize and catalogue the contents of the local historical society’s archives. Four years later, she graduated from SUNY Potsdam with a degree in history and museum studies, and she’s working on a graduate degree in library studies with a concentration on archival work.

Within a few years, she said, she hopes to be the next town historian, and she wants to bring the area’s history alive for the next generation.

“I think a lot of people now don’t really realize where they’ve come from,” she said.

Roberts eventually moved from Northville in Fulton County to the town of Edinburg on the Saratoga County side of the Great Sacandaga Lake.

When the water is low, she still ventures out among the ruins, but now she does it with her two young children. At 3 and 5 years old, they’re a bit too young to ponder the mysteries of a deserted, purposefully flooded town.

“But they like to walk along and find things and tell me about them,” she said.

Reach Gazette reporter Kyle Adams at 723-0811, [email protected] or @kyleradams on Twitter.