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Sitting at a tiny table in the Penobscot County Registry of Probate in Bangor, Oneita Wilde gently opened age-stained papers Wednesday.
As each page unfolded, so did a small piece of history.
For 13 months, Oneita Wilde, 67, and her husband, Waldo Wilde, 70, have been working in Maine – far away from their El Dorado, Calif., home – organizing and photographing public documents that date back a century or more.
Volunteers for the Genealogical Society of Utah, an extension of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the couple is recording the documents in a digital medium intended to preserve the information and increase access to it.
The records include wills, estates and guardianships that go as far back as 1816, the inception of the county. Copies of the documents archived will be made available through the society, and a copy will go to the county as part of an agreement reached with the county.
The pages the Wildes are photographing are fading and damaged by exposure to light, mold, original ink spills, rips, oily deposits from human handling and even the acid used to make the paper.
“The paper is brittle and disintegrating,” Susan Bulay, Penobscot County register of deeds, whose office down the hall is next on the Wildes’ to-do list, said Tuesday. The Penobscot County commissioners approved a contract with the genealogical society last fall for probate documents and again this week for the work to be done at the Registry of Deeds.
The contract calls for no money to be exchanged, and copies are not available to the county for resale. The society also can’t sell copies of the digital records without county permission, but it can sell or charge access fees for any resources it creates from those records.
The probate documents show life’s successes, such as an early 19th century will of an entrepreneur who left a fortune of about $125,000 to his family, including a ship to his wife. The probate documents also contain life’s travesties and losses, such as a mother who died after her husband was killed in the Civil War, leaving their children without parents.
Oneita Wilde’s look into history is a momentary glance, however. There is plenty of work to be done. More papers to prepare.
The Wildes have been working in the Penobscot County probate offices since February, and before that, in Piscataquis, Somerset and Androscoggin counties. Penobscot County was supposed to be a three- to-four-month project, but the couple quickly found that there were more documents and more care to provide.
To get the documents flat enough so that her husband can capture them on digital film, Oneita Wilde carefully unfolded the documents and spread them out. Sometimes she uses a steam iron and a gentle touch to press the wrinkles out enough for them to be photographed.
She said the job of flattening the pages requires a combination of “respecting the paper and getting the gumption to try it.”
Waldo Wilde’s work is meticulous as well. The papers are placed on a table, with a camera suspended a few feet above it. Four arms jut out from the back and hold the gentle white lights focused on the table and objects below.
A computer monitor shows Wilde what the camera sees. From time to time, he enlarges a tiny sample of faint writing, such as the line that crosses the letter “T” in the name of Ambrose Flint, a probate registrar in the early 1800s. The idea is that if there is enough detail there, the rest of the document should show up clearly as well.
Amateur genealogists themselves, the Wildes said that while their jobs here are repetitive, they are not monotonous.
“Just as soon as I think I’ve seen it all, there’s something new,” Oneita Wilde said Tuesday. She found the will of a New Zealand man, who had property in Maine, written on sheepskin.
“I could still smell the mutton,” she said.
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