The Union Meeting House is on the National Register of Historic Places primarily because of the famous well preserved trompe l’oeil murals by Charles Schumacher, of Portland, done in 1866-68. The building was built in 1827-28 and is said to be one of the oldest brick churches in Maine. The presentation will focus on the murals and discuss steps being taken to preserve this historic, artistic and cultural landmark.

The speaker, Marius B. Peladeau, is the president of the Union Meeting House, director emeritus of the Farnsworth Art Museum, former executive director of the Theater at Monmouth, former exhibition curator at the L.C. Bates Museum, in Hinckley, former director of the Maine League of Historical Societies and Museums. He was an accredited White House correspondent and press secretary to a U.S. Congressman. Marius also holds B.A., M.S., and M.A. degrees and is the author of six books on art, history and culture.

The Kennebec Historical Society August Presentation is co-sponsored by the Lithgow Public Library and free to the public (donations gladly accepted). The presentation will take place on Wednesday, August 16, at 6:30 p.m., at the Lithgow Public Library, located at 45 Winthrop Street in Augusta.

Isaac H. Gingras, of Augusta, was inducted into the St. Lawrence University chapter of Theta Alpha Kappa, the national honorary society for religious studies and theology, in Canton, New York.

Gingras is a member of the class of 2018 and is majoring in government. Gingras attended Cony High School, in Augusta.

The World Languages and Cultures Department at Eastern Connecticut State University, in Willimantic, Connecticut, recently held its annual induction ceremony for Sigma Delta Pi, the national honor society for Spanish.

Kirstin Hayward, of Augusta, was one of the inductees. Hayward’s major is Continuing Education.

Sigma Delta Pi is a member of the Association of College Honor Societies..

The Kennebec Historical Society emphasizes the collection of Kennebec County family and organizational documents and photographs. Twenty years ago, the society’s catalog was entirely on paper. At this point, however, it has been moved to a computer database available for interested researchers at their headquarters at 107 Winthrop Street in Augusta.

To stay current and useful to our clients, the Kennebec Historical Society believes that the next step is to move its database to the internet and offer not just indexes but also scanned images of complete documents, transcriptions of handwritten and printed documents, and images of photographs and other objects.

Although it will take some time and financial resources to get to that point, the KHS collections committee believes that now is the time to take steps in preparation. This means that as well as indexing documents using key words denoting subjects, locations, organizations, events, type of items, and names, so called this meta data, we need to start “digitizing” our items; that is, scanning photographs, using optical character recognition to convert printed items to text documents, and transcribing hand written documents. If we start doing this now, we won’t have to go back and do it later when we are ready to move to the internet. But this adds considerable time to the act of cataloging items. We have found that we are building up a backlog of uncatalogued materials as we purchase items and receive them as donations.

In February 2017, they applied to the Maine State Archives for a grant from the Historical Collections Grant Program, funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, to hire interns to help in the cataloging for the internet effort and therefore reduce or eliminate backlog. In March, they received notification that the request for $3,628.26 had been approved, in full. The request will cover hiring interns for the spring and fall and purchasing of supplies and computer hardware to support the “digitization” effort. Combining this with donations they receive to support summer interns should move them well on their way to elimination the immediate backlog.

Current researchers at the society will immediately see the results of this effort as records of newly cataloged items will contain full text transcriptions that can be read and/or printed at the society. Photographs will also be available for printing as will scans of documents.