Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1670

Veterans’ Day program this evening at Dorchester Historical Society, 195 Boston Street

7 pm.  The following appears in this week’s Dorchester Reporter

Faces, stories from the Great War on display at Historical Society

By

Jackie Gentile, Special to the Reporter

Dorchester has a past steeped in history, one that is made more tangible through the efforts of the Dorchester Historical Society. This week, the Society’s Veterans Day program will feature a photo album filled with pictures of World War I soldiers from the neighborhood. The event will take place at the William Clapp House on Fri., Nov. 11 at 7 p.m.

Retired Colonel Karen MacNutt, a native of Dorchester and DHS member, will be the featured speaker. MacNutt was not only one of the first women to become an officer in the Massachusetts National Guard, but also its first female attorney. She will present several artifacts from WWI and discuss some photos she has selected from the album.

Emy Thomas, chair of the DHS’ Cataloguing Committee, discovered the album last spring. A handwritten note attached to the inner cover of the album revealed that the 160 photos were given as a gift in March 1924 from the wife of Dr. Nathaniel R. Perkins, per his instructions. The note went on to say that there was an accompanying card catalogue.

“And I said, ‘A card catalogue?’” Thomas laughs. On a hunch, she searched through an index card file cabinet in the Society’s office at the William Clapp House. “And by golly, they were in there.”

The 4 x 8 inch cards, which contain biographical information about most of the servicemen and women, were shoved into the file cabinet drawers in almost alphabetical order. Reading through the cards was exciting for Thomas, a history buff and amateur genealogist. It was an emotional experience for her as well.

“It started to bring tears to my eyes when I started to read a little bit of that,” she said.

The photos have been scanned electronically so people can more easily access them without touching and potentially damaging the physical photos. Like many institutions, the Society takes great care to preserve artifacts, documents and photos properly, an expensive and enormous undertaking, DHS president Earl Taylor says. Special archival holders such as polyester sleeves for photos and acid-free folders for paper documents are used to preserve the historical paraphernalia.

Dr. Perkins, a resident of 1122 Adams St., officially examined over 1000 army recruits for WWI. The album begins with a photo of Perkins himself. Service members from different military branches are represented, including five women, two of whom were nurses overseas. Some are shown on horseback, some are in uniform, and others are wearing gasmasks and other equipment.

“I think it’s artifacts that really give you a visceral connection to the past,” said Taylor. “It’s one thing to read in a book, but then to actually see something that was handled by a person from the past, think how it might have been used or to see a picture of that person from the past. It just makes it all the more real.”

With much of Dorchester’s housing records available from that era, Taylor believes that residents can track down the names and possibly the faces of those who walked the same streets and more.

“There is an immediate connection when a person of today can say that man or woman lived on my street, or perhaps even in my house.”

Two plaques commemorating the names of locals who fought in the Great War will also be on display. One plaque, taken from the First Methodist Church in Lower Mills when the building was torn down in the 1960s, comes from the Third Religious Society. The other, originally from the Blaney Memorial Baptist Church on the corner of Richmond St. and Dorchester Ave. (where Meetinghouse Bank stands now) is a gift from DHS board member Robin Allsop.

Both Taylor and Thomas hope that residents will not only see the exhibit as a historical attraction, but also as a chance to possibly connect with their own history.

“It means a lot that we’ve come across something that we can actually share with the community,” Thomas said. “We hope that some people just may say, ‘Wow, there’s an ancestor of mine!’ We’d like that.”

The exhibit will run on Nov. 12 from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. and on Nov. 20 during the regularly scheduled open house hours, 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. For more information, visit dorchesterhistoricalsocietyblog.org.

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