For those who follow the Way Back Wednesday posts, they get an interesting peek into The Mariners’ Museum’s history. Many people, including our staff, don’t realize that there is a whole treasure trove of these photos kept in the back of the museum in storage. Part of the reason for this is that there has never been a complete inventory done for them, so no one is completely sure what all we have. We have been working on fixing that problem with the tremendous help of our volunteer Melissa, a CNU student.

Melissa has been spending her time sorting the photographs into different categories, arranging the photograph folders by date, replacing old acidic materials with newer archival materials, and putting the photographs into an excel database that will allow us to do word searches to find images showing particular subjects. The importance of these photos in regard to the history of the museum and our collection is immeasurable, and it has been great fun going through them.