Family mysteries have been solved; longstanding land ownership disputes have been settled. That’s what has happened in Nantucket, Massachusetts because Town Clerk Catherine Flanagan Stover didn’t give up until she found funding to restore old records and documents dating from 1600, as well as a means to make them accessible and searchable.

“Before, many of these records were in our attic, rolled up, covered in dust,” Stover said. But now those records and documents have been “cleaned, repaired, encapsulated, rebound, microfilmed and converted to Laserfiche images so they can be searched,” she said.

More than $600,000 in Community Preservation Act funds helped her accomplish the task. Since 1999, she said, she had applied for funds from one source after another with little or no success. Even when potential funding appeared, “other pressing obligations got in the way.” She was hesitant to push too hard at times, because, as she puts it, “I didn’t want to bust the Town budget.”

The Community Preservation Act (CPA) was signed into law in September 2000. Communities that adopt the Act by ballot referendum may set up funds in their own municipalities and fund them through a three-percent surcharge of the real estate tax levy on real estate. The Act also created a matching state fund. The Act requires that at least 10% of the funds raised by communities be distributed to each of three categories: open space protection, low- and moderate-income housing and historic preservation.

In the Barnstable Town Clerk’s office since 1987, Linda Hutchenrider had also led a largely futile search for funding. She had limited success, acquiring funding for restoration of four books from a historical commission and squeezing funding into her budget annually to restore a book a year. She thought:“I will be dead, buried and gone before I get it all done.”

CPA funding changed all that, she says, and this year, with the amending of the Act’s language to specifically“permit the use of funds for restoration of historic town documents and artifacts,” it should be even easier for Clerks to receive funding. Any Clerk who doesn’t jump on the opportunity needs to rethink his or her purpose, Hutchenrider said. It is the statutory obligation of Clerks to restore, record, archive, care for and make accessible to the public the records of their municipality.

It isn’t enough to restore, rebind and preserve historical documents, she said. After all that is done, you don’t really want people going through the records, handling them, and yet you do want them to be
accessible. Scanning them into a database and making them searchable, as she is doing in Barnstable through a Laserfiche system, helps her protect records and share them at the same time.
Hutchenrider, a past president of the Massachusetts Clerks Association, summed it up: “If you ever want to leave a legacy to your town, make the legacy the fact that you worked to preserve what is most important to your community, the written history.”

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