Obligations

I checked the museum's email this morning. It appears a trip down the luge run (or maybe it's a skeleton run -- I will be facing forward while going down The Hill; not staring at the sky and screaming) is on the agenda for tomorrow. We sold another lot of vintage ladies' hankies so as the secretary/treasurer I get to go down, stuff them into an envelope, and haul the package to the post office. It may be the last lot of decorative snot rags out of the ones listed on Ebay a couple weeks ago. If only the other weirdness we'd like to get rid of would move as fast. Alas, the market for vintage laminated Tigers souvenir placemats apparently 'borrowed' from a Big Boy restaurant or an 1890s guide to American artists (Recent Ideals of American Art; a book that's both humongous and heavy) is apparently limited. We've got half a dozen of the placemats. No one wants them. Ditto the art book.

The museum's been on my mind a lot lately anyway. Besides the Ebay stuff and thinking about the water stains on the ceiling (just how many shingles go missing every time there's a strong north wind?) I'm worried about summer. At this point we have zero, nada, zilch, absolutely no volunteers waiting in the wings to serve as docents. Our older members who are still breathing and used to volunteer have hit that stage of fragility in geezerhood that doesn't allow them to deal with being on their feet as much as a docent has to be; our younger members (a depressingly small number) all have conflicting obligations, like jobs. We don't have anyone who hits that sweet spot: old enough to be retired, young enough to still be physically fit and reasonably agile. 

It is, to put it mildly, going to truly suck if we get two really nice new exhibits up and there's no one available to unlock the front door so visitors can see them. (The S.O. and I have a conflicting commitment for this coming summer; we will not be around to see what, if anything, happens between the end of May and Labor Day.)

Where have all the volunteers gone?

I spent a good chunk of yesterday at the Spring meeting of the Northland Historical Consortium. The Consortium is a loose organization of local historical societies and museums located in the western half of the Upper Peninsula and along the Wisconsin border. The membership includes county historical societies and special interest groups, e.g., the Painesdale Mine and Shaft, dedicated to preserving the history and physical structure of a particular site.

Champion Mine Shaft No. 4, Painesdale, Michigan

I was, for what its worth, moderately amused to hear the Painesdale representative describing their mission as "preserving the shaft." Strikes me as a simple task if you take her literally: just don't let anyone fill in the hole. What she meant, of course, was preserving the shafthouse, a building I don't recall ever seeing in the flesh, but obviously it exists. Also for what it's worth, every time I encounter folks who have dedicated themselves to preserving something like a shaft house, I find myself breathing figurative sighs of relief that the Baraga County Historical Society isn't the proud owner of a similar money pit.

The focus of yesterday's meeting was digitization. The archives at Northern Michigan University received a grant to help set up a collaborative network that would include members of the consortium and potentially other heritage organizations. The goal is to get us all started on digitizing our collections and making them available through the Internet. The project would allow people all over the world to access materials that at the moment they may not know even exist and would also serve as a bit of an advertisement for our individual institutions. You know, you go searching for a particular topic on the Internet, find that a copy of a photograph or a document relating to that topic is part of a collection at the Covington Township Historical Society, and become curious about what else that organization might have stashed in its filing cabinets.

Michigan is apparently a bit behind some other states in setting up this type of collaboration. North Carolina has an impressive program up and running; so do a number of others. I personally think it's a neat idea. At this point all it would cost our local historical society is a little bit of time so I can't think of a logical reason to refuse to participate. I know our museum has materials academic researchers would love to look at if they knew they existed, so I see the project as a Good Thing.

But the digital project isn't what was actually on my mind when I started typing this morning. It was Volunteers, or the lack thereof. I've been going to these consortium meetings since September 2012. I don't make it to every one -- as a group we do try to spread representation out a little -- but I've been to enough that I'm starting to recognize people. You know what?  I see mostly the same faces at every meeting. They're not getting any younger. Everyone has the same problem. Membership numbers are shrinking, people are aging out (it's hard to volunteer once you're in the nursing home) or dying, and everyone is having trouble recruiting new volunteers. The woman who is the computer geek for one group mentioned that she's now 85 years old. Quite a few of the representatives from other groups looked like they weren't much younger, if at all.

So where have all the younger potential volunteers gone? As usual, there was a fair amount of carping about how useless and self-centered the younger generations have become. Pshaw.

As a social scientist (or a retired social scientist), I'm inclined to give it a structural and economic explanation. I can recall being a Girl Scout leader back in the '70s. At the time I began volunteering, I didn't have a job. I didn't need one. The S.O. was employed full-time; he made enough money that I could enjoy the (remarkably boring) life of a Stay-At-Home mom. Most of my fellow leaders were in the same position: spouse worked, wives had plenty of free time for volunteering at church or with youth groups like 4-H and Scouting. The women who did work had good jobs with predictable hours. A few taught school, a job that wasn't nearly as soul-sucking and stressful as it is now (it was before the insanity over testing swung into full force and schools still had budgets that allowed teachers to make sure classrooms had the supplies they needed). No one was doing the juggling two or three part-time positions in the hopes of coming close to having the equivalent of a 40-hour work week. It's hard to volunteer for anything when you're dealing with truly bizarre work schedules.

Then when you toss in the unintended consequences of raising a couple of generations of kids, people who are adults now, who were told they HAD to volunteer. Two words that do not belong together: volunteer and mandatory. But that's what schools have done in a truly misguided attempt to get students engaged with the community. Forced students to volunteer. If you're a member of National Honor Society, you MUST volunteer. It's not volunteering if you're told you have to do it. But if you're a member of various other organizations (football team, DECA, whatever) you will be told you have to volunteer.

I do not doubt there are some kids who enjoy their volunteer assignments, but for a whole bunch of others "volunteer" has become associated in their minds with picking up trash along the highways or some other task they did not particularly want to do. If I'm talking to someone who is, let us say, in their 30s and I see them visibly cringe at the term "volunteer" I know that person was coerced into doing something unpleasant in order to satisfy a criterion for retaining their Honor Society eligibility.

So where have the volunteers gone? Between an economy where wages have been stagnant since Jimmy Carter was in the White House and an educational system that turned volunteering into a punishment detail, it's not much of a mystery. At this point, the more relevant question may be who's going to turn off the lights at our museums when the last of the geezers takes the dirt nap?

More wildlife news

The museum has beavers. The S.O. and I took advantage of the unseasonably warm weather yesterday to finish installing the half-round siding on the east end of the building. Siding installation had come to a screeching halt there back in September when time and ambition ran out more or less simultaneously. We were, in fact, both so thoroughly burnt out on that siding project that a couple weeks ago I talked with a guy who does handyman type stuff, small projects most contractors don't want to mess with, about finishing the work for us. In addition to needing to do the last two rows on siding on the east end, there's also the south wall that needs another 14 sheets or so of T1-11 put up and a delaminating door on the west end of the storage building that should be replaced. Not a whole lot of work but enough to keep the guy busy for a day or two. He promised to get back to me ASAP with a price; I'm still waiting for that phone call. I told the S.O. he should look into doing odd jobs -- the guys who advertise as handymen must be doing okay if they can be as cavalier about following up on requests as the couple I've dealt with since getting involved with the museum.

Museum as seen from the southeast. Yes, I know the placement of the storage building door makes no sense. When they moved that garage, it's like they set it up backwards. The truly stupid thing is they put it at the extreme end of the concrete pad so it's just ordinary dirt and sod right in front of that door. Totally, totally illogical. Anyway, the pavilion the Baraga High School construction trades class is building for us is visible to the west of the storage building. The trusses are all up and the students should start roofing soon. 

In any case, it was decent weather and I really wanted the siding done. Finishing the siding would mean no 14-foot long pieces on the floor in the storage building that I'd have to step around every time I went in there. It would also mean we could clear out the pile of scrap pieces, all the short odds and ends that had been left over but we couldn't discard until all the siding was up. And now it's up and the odds and ends have moved to our woodshed -- I anticipate a future for them as kindling. I'm not sure if that siding is pine or spruce, but it definitely burns really easily.

Looking across the wetland/pond across the Bay to L'Anse

I am, incidentally, still feeling a bit smug about how close I came on estimating how much siding the museum would need for that job. We ran out of long pieces with two rows to go (another thing that brought the siding to a halt in September; the last 4 long pieces didn't get delivered until just before we had to leave for Missouri), and there actually wasn't much scrap left over. We filled a cardboard box or two with really short pieces (i.e., chunks under a foot long), but there weren't many that were more than 2 feet in length.

So where do beavers come into this story? After the S.O. was set up to work on the siding, I went wandering over to our wetland. There's a pocket park, a not-so-natural area between the museum grounds and Keweenaw Bay. It's a wetland that was created about 25 years ago as mitigation when a small marina went in just down the shoreline. It was planted with wetland shrubs and forbs -- speckled alder, willow, cattails, etc. -- and provides habitat for various critters. Every summer there are redwing blackbirds nesting in the area, we see occasional ducks and for sure we see geese (they do a pretty comprehensive job of fertilizing the lawn).

There's a beaver lodge starting to grow in that clump of cattails.

And now there are beaver. I had noticed some of the shrubbery was looking a little thin, that it was easier to see into the area than was the case in previous years. I put it down to higher lake levels drowning cattails. I may have been wrong. I think things are looking thinner because beavers are pruning the speckled alders. There appears to be a beaver lodge growing in the water, and there are a lot of fresh stumps. Given the ability of speckled alder to regenerate, I'm not too worried they're going to eat it all. I just hope that lodge keeps growing so it's more visible. One of these days we're doing a grant application to the Michigan DNR for money for constructing an actual short, accessible trail along the perimeter of that wetland, and it would be cool to have a beaver lodge to include in the interpretive signage.

Done!

The original application for the mitigation, the document that was filed with the U.S. Corps of Engineers and other interested parties, showed a trail completely circling the wetland. It included a pedestrian bridge over the opening from the wetland/pond to the lake. In the fine tradition of property owners everywhere -- I found myself remembering what ConAgra did to the City of Omaha a couple decades ago with their artificial lake -- the marina owner slapped a chain link fence up on that end of the wetland effectively killing any chance of a complete circle. Which is actually okay, because it means no reason to bother spending money trying to bridge the outlet; we'll plan a trail that dead-ends at a bench where one can sit and enjoy the view of the Celotex plant on the other side of the bay in L'Anse.

How not to land a contracting job in one easy lesson

The other day the S.O. and I were down at the museum doing some minor stuff, like finally putting up street numbers near the front entrance. The Baraga Village Fire Department sent out a letter about 15 years ago reminding business owners and residents to put numbers on their structures to make them easier to find in an emergency, but just about everyone (including the museum) ignored the advice. I always kind of wonder how Fed Ex and UPS manage to find people because there are quite a few buildings without street addresses now.

Anyway, a few months ago I decided to invest in a set of numbers. If nothing else, FedEx would never have an excuse again for not being able to locate us. Naturally, given how busy we were with more important things, those numbers just sat on the table in the office for awhile. But we finally got around to putting them up. . . and while we were putting up the numbers, a fellow in an SUV pulled into the parking lot. I thought he might have a question about the contents of the museum or ask for a tour.

I was wrong. He had stopped to critique the paint job on the new siding. Did we, in essence, know that it looked like shit? This struck me as being a rather odd opening gambit for a conversation. Did the fellow not know that he might actually be speaking to the people who had done the painting? Apparently not, because telling him that (a) the work was done by volunteers who didn't get paid a dime, and (b) we knew it had to be second coated and it would be taken care of in the Spring did not stop him from continuing to tell us how bad it looked. It was actually a little baffling. I mean, it's been warm lately but everyone knows you can't paint or stain anything once temperatures drop below the mid-50s. So just what did he expect us to do now?

After he finally ran out of insulting things to say about how sucky the building looked, he volunteered the information that he's a contractor who does both carpentry and painting. I asked him if he had a card -- he had to do a little digging, but he found one. He then left, which I figured he'd do once we'd asked for contact information. 

I don't think he was even out of the parking lot before the card was confetti on its way to a trash can. If he'd had brains enough to just say that he'd noticed the museum hadn't quite finished the siding project before winter hit and let it go at that, he might have had a shot at hearing from us next Spring. But when I was one of the people who got covered with oil stain and wound up dismayed by the realization we were going to have to second coat? Yes, we know the coverage isn't what we had hoped it would be. Do we want some stranger rubbing that fact in? In a word, No. So good luck trawling for contracting jobs, dude, but here's a hint: next time figure out who you're talking with before you start running your mouth.

Getting my life back

The siding project is inching ever closer to completion, the "on" season for the museum now has a mere 4 days to run (our last regular open day for 2015 is September 5), and we just acquired a new member who is enthusiastic about genealogical research. I could be close to getting my life back.

The overgrown junipers have been dug up; with them gone, the museum should be much more recognizable from the highway, especially once we've got the foot-high letters saying "Historical Society" back up on the wall. The bushes had grown so tall that signage was no longer visible. I'm a little surprised the bushes grew as big as they did; junipers must like sand because the dirt they came out looks like it belongs on a beach. 

Don't get me wrong. I do like volunteering at the museum. I love doing the inventorying and cataloging. I also like grant writing and doing an occasional press release. I just don't like dealing with people, hence, being a docent is the least favorite thing I do. I'm also not real keen on being the person who serves as the liaison with the Chamber of Commerce, Village of Baraga, Baraga County government, etc. I got a phone call at the museum the other day that gave me cold shivers. One of the local insurance agents called and asked me if I was "Nancy, the person who's running the museum." Definitely a Harlan Ellison moment. I do not want the museum linked that closely with my name by anyone. It could also be one of the reasons the S.O. and I are now talking about taking a very long road trip next summer with the Guppy -- we want to go to Alaska while we're still young enough to do it, which in turn means blocking out a month or more in the warm weather months. The Guppy is not exactly a speed machine. And if I am not physically around, someone else is going to have to step up to fill the gap. At least in theory.

This is the type of research I like: figuring out who made this wrench, when, and what for. It's a tractor wrench and was most likely made by Case.

But I digress. I'm also not real fond of doing the genealogical research, probably because I've never understood the fascination some people have for family history. I think a bit of appreciation for family heritage is good, especially when accompanied by some moderately amusing anecdotes -- we always refer to the one bad piece of fruit in a bag of fruit as the "Cohodas orange" thanks to a story my Old Man liked telling about his experiences working for Sam Cohodas back in the 1930s* -- but I really don't care much about how many siblings one of my great-great-great-grandfathers may have had and where they all wound up.

Still, someone had to be doing it. A significant chunk of our budget comes from the fees people pay us to do the stuff they can't track down online, like finding copies of ancient obituaries in the L'Anse Sentinel (the paper is not digitized). Our deceased past president, the guy who died in 2013, loved doing genealogical research. It fascinated him; he was quite happy to put in many hours trying to track down lost branches of people's family trees. I'm really hoping our new member who says she's interested in genealogy turns out to be as much of a fanatic as Jim. I get bored after about the first 15 minutes, and for sure I have no desire to make trips up to the Michigan Tech archives, other historical societies, or a Mormon history center. There are local history topics I'd like to do some in-depth research on, but they're slightly more macro than one family tree.

Anyway, the fact our newest member seems enthusiastic about both local history and genealogy has me hoping we'll be able to slide a few of the research requests we get to her. If she actually likes doing it, she's bound to be both better and faster at it than I am.

As for the siding project, we now have building wrap up on two sides of the building, it should get wrapped the rest of the way tomorrow, and then it's on to doing the siding. We may, in fact, be able to start siding tomorrow, too. We ordered the siding last week; it should come in on a truck today. I can hope. 

*At the time, fruit came on railcars in huge crates; it got bagged locally. The Old Man, a teenager at the time, was bagging oranges for Cohodas. Whenever he spotted a rotten orange, he'd toss it to one side. Cohodas, who went on to make so much money he's got a building named for him at Northern Michigan University, stopped him. "No, no, no. You don't throw the bad ones away! You put one rotten orange in with eleven good ones in the bag. No one will complain about just one bad orange when the others are all good."  Cohodas gets remembered now as a great philanthropist because he donated a lot of money to NMU, but every time I see the name I think about him being willing to screw people over the price of an orange during the Great Depression. Yet another example, I guess, of the old saying that behind every great fortune there is a great crime. . . or a whole lot of little ones.

Progress, sort of

The front of the museum with furring strips completed.

Today's going to be another museum day for me and the S.O. He's gotten stuck supervising the minions working on the siding project. After looking at the budget, the historical society decided we'd do half-round log siding on 3 sides and put up T1-11 on the back wall. The S.O. and one of the other members, a retired contractor, are providing technical advice and oversight of the minions, a couple young guys willing to work irregular hours for not much money. One kid is still in high school, another one just graduated. They don't have much experience, but they're willing to work. Sort of. They're not exactly eager to start super early in the morning (which is fine with the S.O.; he's never been a morning person) and they seem to run out of steam after about 5 hours. When they do, we don't argue. We have lives and other things we'd rather be doing, too.

One of the minions.

This is one of those projects that's technically easy -- put up furring strips, do the building wrap, nail up the log siding -- but can be remarkably time-consuming. The existing log walls are, to say the least, irregular. The furring strips are requiring a lot of chiseling and shimming. Still, the end is in sight. The minions have reached the last wall and, if all goes smoothly today, just might finish the strips. Then it's a case of double-checking the shimming, getting the building wrap on, and starting the siding. It's going to be interesting comparing the gas bills after the siding with the ones from before. The amount of natural gas we burn should drop considerably once we can no longer see daylight between the logs.

Before the minions vanish, I'll have one other task for them: removing the overgrown bushes from in front of the museum. They're a type of juniper that did not get trimmed for a number of years and really need to go. I'm not sure what the reasoning was behind planting them in the first place, but we need something that that's easier to maintain. I'm leaning toward to putting in some native shrubs, like blueberry bushes, but we could always just let it revert to lawn.

Family trees with missing branches

I've been dealing with a research request at the museum that's turned into a bit of puzzler. As a result, I have a suggestion for anyone who's contemplating doing genealogy and delving into his or her family's past: pick ancestors with unusual last names. It is not exactly fun trying to track down the ancestors of someone with a surname like, for example, Johnson in a community where every other person seems to be named Johnson. It also does not help to be dealing with ethnic groups and generations where a lot of kids were given Swedish or Finnish names at birth so they were registered as Johannes or Jussi but decided they'd rather be called John when they got older. Or maybe they disliked their first name so always used their middle name instead. Then toss in the possibility that the only name you ever heard your grandfather referred to by was actually a nickname and not his actual name at all and things will get truly frustrating.

I have, in short, spent a whole lot more time worrying about this one research request than something as simple as the normal research request should take. After investing way too many hours in the project, I still have no solid information. The grandfather in question was apparently not married in Baraga County, or, if he was, his first name was different than what the grandson remembers. Similarly, he did not die in Baraga County -- there are death certificates for persons with the name the grandson remembers, but none are the man I've been looking for. He was well-known in the community so there should be an obituary. No doubt there is, but the L'Anse Sentinel isn't indexed and I'm not prepared to spend all summer reading through 50 or 60 years worth of newspapers looking for one dead guy. I'd like to have at least one solid clue before I turn on the microfilm reader at the library. Was he buried in Baraga County? He's not on any of the grave indexes we have for the cemeteries -- the one person I've found with the right name as born too recently to be the guy I'm looking for.

The requester did give me one solid clue: his mother's name and birthday. Theoretically this would yield a birth certificate with her parents' names on it. Only one problem: his mother's birth was apparently not recorded in Baraga County either. At the time she was born, pregnant women had three choices: they could give birth at home, they could utilize a small "nursing home" operated by a nurse-midwife, or they could go to a hospital in a neighboring county. Women who could afford it often chose the last option. (Small digression: we have not progressed since then. The choices have been narrowed to one: go to a neighboring county. There are no certified midwives available to attend home births, and the local hospital doesn't have a delivery suite.) If a baby was born in Houghton or Marquette County, there'd be no record locally.

There are other possibilities: he's remembering the wrong year for her birth or he's got his grandparents' names wrong. Either one is possible.

So how much more effort am I going to put into this request? I'm not sure. I know from reading through the correspondence files at the museum that people don't like it when we come up with null results. Personally, considering how incredibly low the museum's research fee is, I think they should be amazed we're willing to do the work at all, but then again most people have no clue just how time-consuming and tedious trawling through legal records and old newspapers can be. I'd love to raise our rates -- or, better yet, find out there are actually some professional genealogists locally I could refer people to -- because right now we're so under priced it's pathetic. If I were doing research work as a contract historian, I'd charge at least $80 an hour so it kind of floors me that I'm volunteering for an organization that only charges $10. Then again, maybe that low rate is one reason people get pissy when we can't find anything. After all, how hard can we be working when we're practically giving our time away?

Balkanization?

Yesterday I attended the spring meeting of the Northland Historical Consortium. The Consortium is a loose affiliation of local museums and historical societies located across the western and central Upper Peninsula and northeast Wisconsin. There's a fair amount of variety in the membership. Some groups are focused on preserving a specific town or area's history; some are tightly focused on just one structure, e.g., a one-room school or a historic house. I did notice one thing, though.

The group that is doing the best in terms of having the largest overall membership and strongest financial base is the Keweenaw County Historical Society. In terms of dues-paying members, they're huge. Really huge. They're also big in terms of sites they preserve and manage: they have eleven separate museums/historic buildings throughout the county: a lighthouse, a church or two, a schoolhouse, and other sites. And they represent the entire county. There are no little groups where it's a handful of elderly people trying to preserve just one farmstead or old schoolhouse.

The other consortium members are a different story. Lots and lots of people who are totally sincere in their love of local history and their desire to preserve it, but  are also totally balkanized. Instead of one big umbrella county organization, there are half a dozen or more small groups that are often in competition for the same small potential volunteer pool. The host organization for the meeting -- the Ishpeming Historical Society -- is a classic example. They're a fairly new group that spun off from an existing museum (the Cliffs Shaft House Museum) a couple years ago. They now have a nice space in the old Gossard factory building in Ishpeming and have put together a decent little museum in a short period of time. The question I have is why? Why separate from Cliffs? They've now got two groups in a small town with a huge amount of overlap between the histories. They're definitely competing for the same visitor pool and the same group of potential volunteers. What does having two separate organizations in the same small town gain them? Not much.

I could say the same thing about Baraga County. We're not immune. At one time, the Baraga County Historical Society was The historical society for the country. It had a large membership and a lot of committed volunteers. Then it started balkanizing. Some members got involved in preserving an old Finnish farmstead. Did it occur to anyone to keep it as a site managed by the Society as a whole? Apparently not. It got spun off as a totally separate organization, one that's now been around long enough current members don't even realize the Baraga County Historical Society is the reason it exists -- I know its administrative and legal history because I've spent the past two years sorting through files at the Baraga County Historical Museum and read the various pieces of correspondence and meeting notes, but with most of the original players now dead, I doubt if many other people know. End result? There are a lot of people with an interest in history who focus all their energy on that one site and never think in terms of the bigger picture.

Ditto Covington: there were people out in Covington who used to be involved in the county society. At some point an opportunity arose to convert the old Covington Township Hall into a local museum. So they formed a Covington Historical Society and now have a nice museum. Just like with the farmstead, a number of the people who helped create that museum had been active in the Baraga County Historical Society. Once the museum was in progress, they left the BCHS to focus solely on Covington. Did either group gain much from it? Not really. Just like with the farmstead, there's now minimal communication or coordination between them and the county historical society. We're all weaker because of the spin-offs, not stronger.

There are days when I wish I'd never focused on organizational sociology way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I did my dissertation. I know only too well what kills volunteer associations. Too small a membership base is definitely one of them, and the various local historical societies and museums are definitely suffering from that. It's no surprise -- our county has a population of approximately 8,600 people spread out over a fairly large area (1,069 square miles). We also have (at last count) 8 historical societies and museums, not counting the Alberta Sawmill, which is managed by Michigan Tech so isn't reliant on volunteers for survival. And we're all competing for the same pool of volunteers.

I don't know why I bother thinking about this stuff. Having balkanized 10, 20, or even 30 years ago, it's real hard to reverse the trend. At this point, all any of us can do is keep reaching out to the other groups and reminding them that networking makes sense: we need to communicate better, learn to coordinate events, and maybe even try an occasional collaboration.

The Consortium, incidentally, was created for just that purpose -- to encourage networking among the numerous small groups. So how successful has it been? Good question. Out of the possible 50 or 60 historical societies and local museums that exist in the western UP, about a dozen had representatives at yesterday's meeting. Which actually isn't a bad turnout considering the distances some people had to drive. There was talk about getting a good website up and running that would help link the various groups so who knows? Maybe we'll all start to cooperate a little more in cyberspace even if we're not particularly good at doing it in the real world. I can dream.