My Summer at the Waterford Museum

Before interning at the Waterford Museum, I never really understood or appreciated the amount of work that went into exhibits. As a visitor, these behind-the-scenes efforts are just not conveyed.

The Waterford Historical Museum

When walking through the Waterford Museum, the displays of historical artifacts seem to effortlessly tell the stories of Waterford, the Erie Canal, and the Hugh White Homestead.

Yet these displays are far from effortless. On the first day of my internship, the museum director of the Waterford Museum introduced me to PastPerfect 5.0, a computer software program that acts as a database for museum items.

The idea of Past Perfect is to not only keep track of items and their histories, but also allow researchers to gain access to such information.

As you can imagine, cataloging items into PastPerfect is a highly important and large part of museum work. It is also very tedious.

Every item you see (and don't see) that was cleared for accession, meaning being officially accepted by the museum, gets an identification number in PastPerfect. It corresponds with the year it was accessioned and the number of accessions for the museum that year.

For instance, the 1947 Waterford High School yearbook - the Fordian - has an ID number of 2017.43. It was accessioned in 2017 and was the forty-third accession of the year.

Waterford High School yearbook

At the Waterford Museum

Assigning ID numbers is an essential step in the cataloging process since the number is physically on the item itself, not just in PastPerfect, for identification purposes. Without a number, locating museum items can be nearly impossible.

And assigning ID numbers is just the first step. Once the item is in the PastPerfect database, every piece of information about the item must be entered into the system – no bit of information is considered irrelevant or unnecessary.

Date, dimensions, provenance (ownership history), material, and summary are a few examples of the many fields required to be filled out for the item.

It takes thorough work, but it is all for good reason, as it helps place museum items into historical contexts and convey their historical significance to prospective researchers.

So for part of my summer, I spent quality time with nearly hundred items at the Waterford Museum, unraveling their stories one-by-one into PastPerfect. Naturally as a history major, I ended up really enjoying this task. You quickly learn that every object and document truly have their own contribution to history, all of which are equally important.

PastPerfect 5.0. A typical screen seen when cataloging

For example, my biggest PastPerfect project entailed cataloging an entire binder of documents about the Saving Waterford's Heritage efforts from 1964-1966. During which, members of the Waterford Historical Society and volunteers moved the Hugh White Homestead from its original location to where it stands now in order to save it from being razed by the Grand Union Company. They then turned the Homestead into the Waterford Museum we know today.

The Saving Waterford's Heritage Collection

Available to researchers at the O'Connor Library

I thought I knew this story well, but looking closely at every speech, letter, and invoice related to the Save Waterford efforts made me realize that I missed out on key details and didn’t know the story to the extent I thought I did.

The invoices recording the labor done on the Hugh White Homestead, from landscaping to building, revealed the amount of work put into the preserving the historic site and transforming it into a museum.

The letters from members in the Waterford Historical Society, to each other and to others invested in the Homestead project, revealed how much Waterford residents cared about and loved their town's history.

That is the point of museums like the Waterford Museum and historians like myself... to uphold and celebrate the stories of extraordinary people and significant events that may have gotten lost in the larger narrative.

Therefore, the other part of my internship, maintaining the museum blog, meant to fulfill this
obligation. Each week I was given the freedom to write about anything I wanted. While it was difficult to narrow down topics, it was never very difficult to connect major events in history, such as the Revolutionary War, back to the Capital Region and items displayed at the Waterford Museum.

For instance, depicted below are a World War II military hat and a letter from a soldier serving in the Civil War sent to his sister in Waterford. Both are featured at the Waterford Museum, and it is items such as these that remind us the importance of local history that is so easily overshadowed.

WWII Military Hat. At the Waterford Museum

Letter from a Civil War solider to his sister in Waterford

(d. May 27, 1861) At the Waterford Museum

If there is anything I learned this summer, it is that everything has historical purpose and significance, including yourself! Stop by the Waterford Museum or become a museum volunteer to learn and live out your historical purpose.

Read more about curatorial work, PastPerfect software, and the Waterford Museum at:
http://www.museumsassociation.org/careers
http://www.museumsoftware.com/pp5.html
http://waterfordmuseum.com/sample-page/museum-history/
http://waterfordmuseum.com/sample-page/volunteer/