Reflections & News About Working With the Past
While studying the array of officials who made up New Jersey’s 19th-century criminal justice system, I often pore over aging coroner’s reports, trial transcripts, and police blotters. While doing that in South Jersey, I came across an unsettling Salem County Cold Case, the murder of Abigail Dilks in 1874. From the beginning, the mystifying case … Continue reading “Salem County Cold Case”
As part of an initiative to preserve the visual history of Singerly Fire Company, I have been working with the department’s museum and archive committee to digitize the Bob Norman Collection. This sizable resource, containing over a half-century of fire service images, was added to the institutional repository by the company’s official fire photographer. Fire … Continue reading “Digitizing Thousands of 35mm Slides for a Museum”
Mike Dixon of Elkton, MD has been named to the Board of Trustees for the National Fire Heritage Center. The National Fire Heritage Center is the nation’s archive for historic documents, and other perishables related to fire protection. These perishables include: art and artifacts, audio, books, charts and graphs, documents, maps, photography, reports, and video … Continue reading “Cecil County Man Named to National Fire Heritage Center”
A story about the passage of 37 years since a sudden, life-shattering tragedy hit San Diego came up in my Delmarva Newsfeed yesterday. On Friday, September 25, 1978, a beautiful, sunny southern California Day, Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) Fight 182 was on final descent into the airport when it collided with a Cessna. Thirteen seconds … Continue reading “Disasters Are Part of a Community’s History and Should be Remembered”