Beaches Museum working to preserve information

Local historians are capturing history in real time and documenting the impact of COVID-19 at the Beaches community. Karen Lamoree, archivist at the Beaches Museum, said preserving images and communications creates a snapshot of experiences of those who lived it for future generations.
Lamoree said the opportunity to document the global impact of the novel coronoavirus echoes the efforts taken to capture the experiences of wartime. “One of the historical advantages of war is that people are very cognizant that they are going through something historic and therefore, they tend to create and save materials that reflect their experience because they know it’s going to be important later on,” she said. “Obviously, the more 3-D the snapshot is, the better.”
To create a panoramic snapshot of the COVID crisis, Lamoree is calling on those in the community serving on the frontlines – in this case, the doctors, nurses and hospital administrators who are seeing firsthand the effects of the virus. Just as valuable are the accounts of citizens, business owners, images of empty restaurants, masked shoppers and drone images of vast stretches of empty beaches.
“If you were talking about war, you wouldn’t want just the experiences of soldiers on the front lines,” she said. “You’d also want the experiences of the medics, the experiences of the people on the home-front and that might be domestic or the Rosie the Riveter working in the factory. You have to really look behind the scenes.”
Executive Director Chris Hoffman has enlisted local photographers to capture the scope COVID-19 through a series of photographs that show life at a stand-still with closed businesses, signs of encouragement, plexiglass shields to protect employees the lines that grocery stores are putting on the floor to promote social distance by making aisles one-way.
“Hopefully this is the only time in my lifetime that we’ll see that,” said Hoffman. “The closed signs in front of the beach accesses. I took a picture of the big electronic sign on First Street that says Social Distance Zone. The personal accounts of people sharing their own personal feelings about what is happening requires a little bit more effort on the part of the community members to do.”
The museum also encourages citizens to forward digital correspondence to help illustrate the individual accounts of the viral crisis. “When you are in the midst of something like a global pandemic, obviously that is historic,” noted Lamoree. “The difference is that we don’t create tangible items more in the sense of letters.”
During the second World War, Victory Mail – known as V-Mail – was used by the U.S. Postal Service to correspond with soldiers stationed abroad. According to Lamoree, letters were cherished and saved, handed down through generations as a matter of family record and physical pieces of history. Today, people relying on email and social media platforms to share their accounts of COVID-19. The drawback for historians is the temporary nature of digital communication.
“As an archivist and a historian, how do you document what people are really doing? The answer is you ask people to print them out or screen shot them, create images and send digitally then you print them out. It has to be a little more conscious of an effort because we create constantly these days. In the past people would sit down and write a letter or a journal entry. That’s why we want people to send us what they are doing digitally. This tells the story of what we’re going through,” she said.
“We want to get what people are feeling in the moment because often when we get out on the other side, we color our experiences differently than what we actually lived through. That’s human nature. As historians, what we really to know is what actually happened. How people reflect on it is obviously important too but what actually happened is history is about seeking the truth.”