There are many people who are happy to see the coming of the new year, and yet I must say that for the folks at the Lock 52 Historical Society, 2020 was a pretty good year. Sometimes you need to be forced to slow down to be able to get things done, and that is what is what happened. With all the events canceled and travel banned, our folks had a lot of extra time on their hands. So they decided to take on some projects such as finding and digitizing Port Byron’s old newspapers and other printed materials. In addition to what has been made available on the website, we will be adding the 20-year-run of the InPort Newspaper sometime later this winter. The volunteers dove headfirst into the collections room, various drawers, stray boxes, and other places, to sort out and catalog the many artifacts that have been donated over the years. It is not enough to have an old object if you can’t find it, and that is being sorted. This has resulted in many “new” discoveries tucked away in places people once knew about but have been forgotten over the decades. It’s been fun. The “Thursday Crew” have made wonderful progress in 2020, and they look forward to continuing in 2021.

We also finished our book, Images of Port Byron, in 2020, a project that has been kicking around for years. We decided to begin printing a quarterly newsletter that we will be mailing to our members, something we should have been doing all along. We started a Port Byron family tree, where we have been making the connections between families, as we research them. For instance, this past fall I was asked to do some genealogy on the Peck family. As I developed their family tree, I was left with an incredible amount of information that should be made available to any Peck family genealogists. So they were added. We also began to upload photos to the Find-A-Grave website, and encouraged a local Girl Scout to take on the cleaning headstones and uploading the info inscribed on them as her Gold Award project. We congratulate Sabrina Westmiller, and hope others will follow in her footsteps. And while we have used our down time to accomplish some great things, we hope for a return to normal in 2021, so we can begin to welcome guests and researchers to the house. We also hope to restart programs that will highlight local history and the cemetery walks.

We find that a number of people are rather shy about becoming involved with their local historical society, and that certainly is understandable. There are a number of things you can do to help right from home. For instance the easiest thing is to simply become a member. It helps us with money, but also shows that people are interested, which is very helpful when we go to possible funding agencies. Another thing is to go through your family photos and think about letting us copy some of the older images. Volunteer to look through one of our many scrapbooks and see if there is anything of value in it. Write down your family history as best you know it. You may not be too interested, but you never know 25, 50 or 100 years from now, what distant relative might be doing your families genealogy and might appreciate seeing a note from you. Either write down, or volunteer to be interviewed, so we can capture some of your very unique memories of what it was like to grow up in the area.

For instance, I stumbled across a great series of the personal memories of Elizabeth Smith Case in the 1943 Port Byron Chronicle. Elizabeth was the child of Benson Smith who owned a wagon shop in the village. Throughout the month of April, the Chronicle ran four columns of her memories of what life was like in the 1890s. Elizabeth details a journey by way of a canal steamer named the M.P. Brown to Ithaca so that the fireman could participate in their first Central New York’s Fireman’s Convention. The return trip up the lake was delayed by a number of passengers who had a bit too much fun, which caused the boat to miss a large summer storm that blew boats to shore and that blown Tanner’s Drydock as “flat as the proverbial pancake.” She notes that this was quite the shock to Mr. and Mrs Tanner, as they were on the trip. It is quite a read.