Internship program at Historical Society is a mix of young and old

SHARON — It was a productive mixture of young and old this summer as the Sharon Historical Society hosted its first internship program, in partnership with the Housatonic Youth Service Bureau. “We decided to do it because we have a backlog of work that needs to be done with archives,” explained Marge Smith, who is the society’s assistant director.“Museum attendance is down as people look more and more to the Internet,” she said. “So that’s what the interns are doing: preparing as much of our data as possible for the Internet.”Smith noted that each of the four interns is working on a specific project in addition to pitching in and helping with other projects as needed. One of the criteria for selection, she said, was that the students had to be able to work well on their own, with minimal supervision. In this and other ways, she said, the program has been a big success. The money to pay the four interns came from grants, according to Liz Shapiro, the society’s executive director. The McCarthy Foundation provided a grant to pay two of the interns; the Housatonic Youth Service Bureau provided funds for the other two.The society advertised the positions and had interested teens fill in an application and then come in for an interview. The four who were hired are all Sharon residents. They started work on July 1 and will continue until Sept. 1. Ethan Edholm ended his summer work there a little earlier, so he could return on time Champlain College in Burlington, Vt., where he is majoring in international business with a minor in global studies. The three other interns, all young women, are high school students.Nicole Waldron comes from an old Sharon family. Her project has been to do genealogical research on her family to put together as big a picture of it as she can. Kate Hochswender has been working on a project Smith said the society has wanted to do for a very long time: Identifying who is buried in the Hillside Cemetery. The Historical Society has a cemetery map showing where people are buried; however, many grave sites have only numbers, not names. The registration cards identifying who is buried in each grave have been kept in a vault at the cemetery which is not easily accessible. The cemetery association agreed to bring these cards to the society for one day, so they could be photocopied. Kate is spending the summer digitizing the cards and typing them into a computer spreadsheet. Whenshe is done, the records will be easily available to anyone doing genealogical research.Grace Morse is transcribing a set of diaries kept by the late Warren Houghtaling, who was part of what was known the Golden Age of Sharon. He lived in one of the mansions on South Main Street. A wealthy New Yorker who worked on Wall Street, he was also a gentleman farmer and an early commuter to and from the city.“He kept diaries that give us a glimpse into what life was like then,” Smith said. “Grace has been working on three or four years worth of his diaries, getting them into digital form so they can be put on the Internet. It is the beginning of a study of that whole era of the early 20th century.”Edholm, who has been a volunteer at the society for several years, is doing Civil War research. “We knew the names of the Sharon Civil War soldiers,” he said, “and we’ve had them in separate lists but not all of the lists agree with each other. It was a matter of not only compiling the various lists but also using other resources to get more information about those people — who they married, who their children were, where they worked, etc etera. “Ultimately we want to have a complete list of the names of all the Civil War soldiers from Sharon. “We know some of their names are missing from the war monuments in town,” he added. “In the process of working on the Civil War project we found some of the monuments in Sharon perhaps under-represent the full scope of the number of soldiers who served from this town.” Edholm estimates there are at least 20 names that are not on town monuments of Civil War soldiers, who served from Sharon. He added that Kate has also been helpful with his project because her cemetery research identified the names of peopleburied in the Hillside Cemetery that have the words “Civil War” on their registration cards.