The Navajo County Historical Society is not just interested in preserving the history of local businesses and events, but that of local families as well. Thanks to new scanning equipment, the non-profit organization is offering scanning of historically significant family photos for individuals.
Director JoLynn Fox explained that the offer to scan private photos serves several purposes. First and foremost it creates a permanent electronic record that can be saved on a hard drive or in the cloud to protect against the loss of irreplaceable originals. This electronic copy will be saved by the historical society, as well, so that if a family loses a valuable original it can be replaced by contacting the society.
“We can just make them another print and then they haven’t lost their pictures to a fire or flood,” Fox said.
The second purpose is to create an expanded record of local families who impacted the history of Navajo County. Fox noted that although the society has an extensive photo archive, many of the pictures focus on the same types of subjects and include a limited number of well known historical figures. She said that it is the society’s goal to tell the story of all the people of Navajo County, not just the most recognizable. Many family photo albums also contain records of popular activities in the area throughout the decades, such as cattle round ups, dances, parades, rodeos, sports competitions and community events that would help fill out the historical record of how people lived and interacted within their communities.
Historic photos can also help the society answer questions that cannot always be found in historical documents, such as where a certain business was located at a specific point in time, or when changes were made to local roadways or structures.
Fox noted that the society will return the photographs once they are scanned and the originals remain the property of the original owner.
“We will take the historic family photos, and we will scan them and return them,” she said. “They will be in our system, and our back-up system, and if someone ever needs a copy of a photo that we’ve scanned, all they have to do is come and ask.”
