Emma Stirling believes in ensuring people have access to their history and their stories.
After studying archiving in film studies, she decided to pursue that belief further, getting a master's degree in archiving at Toronto Metropolitan University. She graduated and went on to pursue archiving.
“It’s important. As archivists, we do what we can to preserve the material and share it with people,” she said. “For me, that’s what I love most about archives. Hearing people’s stories and being able to share it.”
The Newmarket Historical Society and the Town of Newmarket have signed Stirling on to restore and digitize the Newmarket Historical Society Archives. Over the next year, Stirling will be tasked with indexing and digitizing all the contents of the archives.
The historical society has worked on the project for several years, fundraising more than $45,000 to hire an archivist on a contract who could do this work. President Erin Cerenzia said she is thrilled to see the project start to come to fruition after hundreds of hours of volunteer effort from the board.
“We’re just so thrilled to be at this stage,” she said. “We knew that this project is so significant to the history of Newmarket that it requires a true expert.”
The archives have remained closed for several years while the society raised money for the project and will remain closed for the project duration.
The archives currently contain more than 2,500 images of Newmarket, official documents of the town dating back to 1805, one of the most intact collections of the Newmarket Era along with early maps, books, family records and histories of Newmarket.
“Everything is going smoothly,” Stirling said. “Even though it’s taking some time, the cataloguing is coming along really well.”
Stirling is on a contract that will go through 2024. Once the project is complete, Cerenzia said there should be a manual to guide historical society volunteers to continue maintenance of the archives and allow them to digitize any new material added to the archives in the future.
Cerenzia expressed gratitude to all those who support the society’s fundraising efforts to make this project possible.
“The end result will be this amazing, standardized, streamlined, digital archival collection that will exist in Newmarket for years and years,” she said.
