With Rhonda Chadwick

This lecture is designed to teach patrons how to create their own family archive for future generations. Attendees will learn the basics of archival principles, digital preservation, storytelling and how to create a legacy using pictures, documents, and artifacts. The discussion is rooted in the idea that our lives matter and that we are all someone else’s ancestor. We will discuss knowing where to begin, learn the best location within the home to store documents, receive a presentation of archival enclosures, and get tips on organizing materials. We will discuss digital preservation and consider a few creative ideas of how to tell our family’s story. Tips on how to prepare for disasters will also be considered. Sponsored by the Holyoke History Room.

Rhonda Chadwick is the author of Secrets from the Stacks: an archivist reveals how to store, digitize, and preserve documents to create a family archive and leave a personal legacy. As a trained archivist, she has worked at numerous libraries, archives, and museums throughout southern New England including the Rhode Island Historical Society, The John Hay Library at Brown University, The Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, The Rhode Island School of Design, and The American Textile History Museum in Lowell, MA. She has a dual MLIS/Archives Management and MA History degree. She is the owner of a personal history business named after her grandmother and great-grandmother called LenaSalina Legacy Preservation. The mission of LenaSalina is to teach people about long-term preservation and archival storage. She gives library lectures throughout New England teaching patrons how to store material items such as photographs, books, and textiles, how to create a digital legacy, how to organize materials for better retrieval, and finding creative ways of telling family and personal stories