When I became a personal historian in 2017, I thought I would mainly work with individuals to create memoir books for their family and friends. Then, in my first interview with a client who was an eighty-seven-year-old man, I became fascinated with the stories he shared with me of the history of Jewish life in my adopted hometown of Beacon, New York. I did not know that in the early and mid-twentieth century, dozens of Jewish businesses thrived on Main Street, including delis, saloons, department stores, and even a Kosher butcher! This history seemed invisible in present-day Beacon, except in the memories of elders, like my client’s.
I knew the centennial of Beacon’s only synagogue was coming up in five years, and my client’s stories inspired me to launch a community history project celebrating one hundred years of Jewish life and culture in Beacon. Little did I know how large this project would become. Eventually, through the help of dozens of volunteers, we interviewed over forty people and produced a series of twelve monthly blog posts, a virtual lecture, an exhibition at the Beacon Historical Society, a digital interactive walking tour, and a large gala event to benefit the synagogue. We received major recognition from the city and local officials, and several newspapers wrote articles about it. We even got profiled on the local TV news channel!
There are so many hidden community histories like the one I uncovered in Beacon. You too may be part of a community with a rich history that has rarely been told. Especially in these times, when people are hungry for a more inclusive account of history that doesn’t white-wash the past, highlighting the legacy of communities that have been underrepresented is especially important.
A side-by-side view of Main Street at Tioronda Avenue in Beacon, New York, in 2022 (left; photograph by Frank Ritter) and a century before (right; photograph courtesy of Beacon Historical Society).
How to create your own community history project
Here are a few tips I garnered along the way that will help you create your own community history project.
Find your inspiration
Whatever sparks your interest at the start, notice it and keep it as your guiding vision for the project. For me, it was hearing my first client’s stories about growing up in Beacon in the thirties and forties, and how different yet familiar that place of his childhood seemed to me. This got me curious to know more about what had happened to the Jewish community since then. How did it change? What socio-political and cultural forces had affected this community? What was the relationship between Jews in Beacon with other communities here?
As you can see, my initial inspiration provoked more questions in me, which drove me to do more research, talk to more people, and eventually create a wonderful project that itself will go down in history! It’s also worth noting that community history projects take a long time to manifest. When you are feeling overwhelmed or confused about your direction, you will need a guiding vision to keep you going.Find Partners
You can’t do a community history project alone. Ideally, a diverse team of people will lead the project who represent the make-up of the community itself. For the Jewish history project, I reached out to the board and clergy of the local synagogue and the board of the local historical society. Both organizations agreed to help, and from there I formed a planning committee of about eight volunteers representing a wide spectrum of the community. We also identified and created subcommittees to work on various parts of the project, such as an oral history subcommittee and a gala subcommittee.
As the lead organizer of the project, I was the chair of the planning committee and acted as the project manager. I delegated whatever tasks I could and found people with the skills I lacked to lead various aspects of the project. Together, we achieved fantastic results, not just because we all pitched in, but also because of the wide range of voices and perspectives we had on the project. Inevitably, people rotated in and out of the committees, but I was lucky to have several people who stuck with me throughout and were core collaborators on the project.Plan and Organize
Community history projects are sprawling and can grow out of control easily if you don’t create some structures to contain them. For the Jewish history project, we spent the first two years just ironing out what we wanted to do. We probably could have cut down this planning time if we had first become clear on our goals for the project. The synagogue wanted to launch a new capital campaign and reinvigorate past members to support their building fund. The historical society wanted to tell more stories about various immigrant groups in Beacon. And the other committee members wanted to connect with their heritage, meet more people in the community, and engage with local history. Once we hashed out these goals, the programs we wanted to do came naturally.
After clarifying the goals and coming up with the major programs we wanted to create, the next step was to budget everything out. Once we saw how much each program would cost, we had to make some tough decisions. Instead of creating a book, we wrote a series of blog posts which would leave a record and be much cheaper to produce. We also received grants to cover the costs of our two main public programs: the exhibition and walking tour. With the costs of the project covered, we used the gala event to help the synagogue achieve their goal of raising funds for their building.Keep Your Vision but Remain Flexible
Timelines, goals, budgets, and outcomes will all change as you go. What is important is to stay true to your guiding vision, but allow your plans to shift as needed. For the Jewish history project, we had hoped to launch the major programs in 2021 on the centennial of the synagogue, but a little global pandemic got in the way. Instead, the timeline shifted to the spring of 2022. Even then, we were biting our nails about having a large indoor gathering on the heels of the Omicron outbreak. Luckily, it went off without a hitch, and our COVID safety measures seemed to work.
The project we produced in the end differed greatly from the one I had originally conceived of back in 2017. As a writer, I really wanted to create a book, but I recognized early on that the goals of my partners differed from mine and we didn’t have the resources or capacity to do it all. I am very proud of the fact that we recorded so many interviews, and have preserved a history that was on the brink of being lost. Now there is a historical archive that future researchers and community members can use indefinitely.
I also feel that we brought the past to life. So many people who visited the exhibition, read the blog, or took the walking tour told us how moved they were by the history of this small but important community. I feel like I accomplished my goal, which was to impart the excitement and wonder about the past that I had when I first heard my client’s stories of growing up Jewish in Beacon. Now I am happy that many more people have the same fondness for this community as I do.
Of course not every community history needs to be as big in scale as the one Anna Brady Marcus led for the city of Beacon, New York, but when community leaders and volunteers become involved, a project’s scope can grow. Here, 175 people attended the Beacon Hebrew Alliance’s gala at The Roundhouse Event Space in Beacon on April 7, 2022. Photograph by Frank Ritter.
Anna Brady Marcus is a writer and media maker who helps others tell their personal and professional stories via her Beacon, NY–based company, Anchor Your Legacy LLC.