The History Taskforce digitizes endangered documents to prevent them from being lost to historians and to the communities whose stories live in them. Archives and universities are very reluctant to take document collections today because of the space all that paper requires for storage and the environment conditions that are needed to keep them from deteriorating .

To assure that this information will be preserved for future generations, this fragile material has to be digitized. This is a very expensive operation, if a for-profit company has to be hired, because it requires expensive equipment and countless hours

of labor.

The Taskforce has recently digitized large southeast Texas collections, including those of the Nat Hart Davis Museum, the Bessie Owen collection, the Old Town Spring Museum collection and the 22,000 documents in the Gandy Collection. These documents are all being made available free to the public through FamilySearch.org. In addition, we do countless small collections for people interested in saving and sharing their family papers with each other. We did not charge a fee to do any of these projects.

We have access to cameras for this work, and we recruit and train volunteers to do the labor but there are some travel, maintenance, and storage expenses for handling this much data. There are no grants available that we have been able to access.

If you think that saving stories, pictures, and all the things that have made communities what they are today is important, we ask for your support in this effort.

The motto of the History Taskforce says “History is a perishable commodity; when its gone, it’s gone forever.” We are working hard to keep this from happening.