Photo Archive Acquisition Project Underway at the Merced Courthouse Museum

Tom Gaffrey is on a mission to preserve history.

Tom, who retired from the Merced County Public Works department several years ago, spends a good part of his free time as a docent at the County Historical Society.

His current project is sorting through thousands of photographs acquired from the Merced Sun Star.

When the paper sold their former G street building and moved to a much smaller office location, a lot of things had to go.

There was simply no space to store boxes and boxes of hard copy photographs.

“We’ve acquired items from the Sun Star in the past,” says Museum Executive Director Sarah Lim. “This was another opportunity for the Museum to preserve local history.”

The photographs arrived with very little information about the subjects depicted.

“We’d get a batch with the year written on the box or envelope.” Tom said.

According to Sarah Lim, museum volunteers went to the Sun-Star office and picked up an estimated ten-thousand photographs.

“They were in envelopes, folders, and boxes,” Sarah said.

The process is extensive with historical archiving protocols to preserve and protect the photographs.

“The first two steps (cleaning and organizing) were completed last year,” Sarah said. “Now, we are in the next major step of researching and accessioning hundreds and thousands of photos and negatives.”

Accessioning refers to the recording of the addition of a new item to the museum collection.

The photos cover a span from the late 1960s to the 1990s.

As a volunteer, Tom adheres to a process set up to handle the photographs.

“We take a batch, sort them out by month, and then examine each photo. In most cases, we examine the actual hard copy of the Sun Star from that month and match up the photo to the story in the paper.”

From there, Tom notes the actual date, captures the printed news story associated with the photo, and then sends it on to the Museum Registrar who records the item into the Museum data base.

“Sometimes, it feels like the old game show Concentration,”Tom says.

“Matching up a small bit of information from the photo to the actual published information about the story from that time.”

On Concentration, contestants would match pieces of a puzzle and then try to solve the rebus behind the pieces.

In this museum project, Tom is matching photographs from as far back as the 1960s to find the news story that relates to the image.

Tom has been working on the project along with other docents and museum staff for about three years.

He expects it will take a couple more years before the entire acquisition of photos is archived.

Museum Executive Director Sarah Lim says this will be a long term project.

“We accessioned eight-hundred photos into the archive for the year 1976.”

There’s another twenty years of images to work on, so she expects this mostly volunteer effort to take a while.

She adds, “It is an ongoing project.”

When completed, historians and other interested people will be able to come into the Museum and access the photographs.

For Tom, he plans on sticking around to see this project all the way to the end.

“Being a third generation Merced County resident,” he says. “I have a real attachment to the area.”

For Tom, it is a mission to preserve local history.