Barnstable town record from 1644Established in 1639, Barnstable is one of the oldest municipalities in Massachusetts, which means its vital records, selectmen’s minutes, and town meeting accounts represent some of the oldest recorded history of local government and early life in this nation.

The books and records dating back to the early 1600s have been deteriorating, however, due to age and from years of handling.

Concerns about losing historical treasures led Town Clerk Ann Quirk to submit an application to the town’s Community Preservation Committee for $33,000 to fund a first phase restoration of the city’s archives. The committee approved the request in December and the Town Council signed off on the funding on Feb. 11.

The funding will cover the restoration of 22 of some of the oldest record books, which date from 1643 through 1966. A records conservation company will take each book apart, deacidify the pages, and encase each page in protective Mylar, so the books can be looked at and handled without gloved hands, which Quirk said is currently necessary to prevent further deterioration.

“We don’t allow anyone to touch them without gloves because as you look at these books, you’ll see where just someone touching it, you can see little dots on the pages from people’s fingertips, where it actually discolors because of the oils in your hands, which can actually over time deteriorate the pages,” she said. “So we were losing the edges.”

During this process, each page will also be scanned into a format that can be uploaded to the town’s Laserfiche system, ultimately creating a searchable database of the records.

Quirk said she has a vault filled with books from the early days of selectmen meetings and town meetings, lists of roads in town and when they were accepted as public ways, land transactions, and other records from the beginning of local government in Massachusetts.

“And they’re all handwritten, of course,” she said. “Someone in the 1700s wrote out the entire Declaration of Independence into the town’s records.”

“It’s the beginning of local government, it really is, and once it’s gone, it’s gone. We can’t replace that. So I said, let’s do everything we can to preserve it and even go further than that and put it into a Laserfiche program, make it really accessible by anyone that’s interested.”

Much of the early selectmen’s notes concern land. Quirk reads an order from 1641 that appoints two men as land measurers, charging them with bounding out acres with stakes. Another order from 1662 appoints four men to meet about “ye grant of our Enlargement at South Sea” — the south side of the town — and to work on “any controversy that may arise between the Indians and this town.”

“There were a lot of things about Native Americans in the earlier years,” Quirk said. “The early stuff is looking at the acres and half acres and making sure everyone knows where the boundary lines are.

“There was a boundary line between Yarmouth and Barnstable that’s a rock,” she added, with a laugh. “That rock has since been found again, so we know where it is. … [The selectmen] were focused on the land mostly, the boundaries and keeping the peace to try to keep everyone on the same page, as it were.”

In modern times, Barnstable is considered a “birthing community” due to the presence of Cape Cod Hospital, which was founded in 1920, so Quirk said the town has approximately 600 books of births, deaths and marriages. Most of those records are not certificates as we know them today, but genealogical lists of parents, their children, marriages and so on.

Barnstable adopted the Community Preservation Act in 2004, adding a 3 percent surcharge to property tax bills to generate revenue for historic preservation, affordable housing, and open space and recreation projects. In March 2006, the state amended the CPA statue to include “documents and artifacts” within the definition of historic resources. Since then, Mendon, Cambridge, Bourne and Beverly are a few of the communities that have used CPA funds for historic records preservation.

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