Remarkable Rochester: Past comes alive through newspapers

This column owes a debt of gratitude to an increasingly popular website with a quirky name, a devoted proprietor and a vast archive of information.

Old Fulton Postcards at fultonhistory.com, would seem to be a place to check out memorabilia from a community or a person named Fulton.

Actually, it's a treasure trove of archived pages from hundreds of New York state newspapers. For sure, it's a place where genealogists, historians and maybe even gossips can find gold.

The site is the creation of a Wizard of Oz named Tom Tryniski who lives in Fulton, near Syracuse. He began his endeavor in late 1998 scanning and posting, you guessed it, old postcards from Fulton.

It didn't take Tryniski long to hop from postcards to newspapers, as he began digitizing old issues of local papers and putting them online.

Despite this added content, he kept the site's name. Millions of visitors had found Old Fulton. Why fix something that wasn't broken?

In 2003, Tryniski got a new and better scanner. The result was more and more content, and Old Fulton now has more than 25 million pages from New York state newspapers.

"I've got a lot of people from all over the world using the site," Tryniski said. "That makes me happy. At least I'm doing something productive here."

It helps that he likes his product.

"I read these old newspapers late at night," he said. "The reporters were artists working with words — the detail they went into, the research."

The site continues to be a one-man job, a labor of love. Tryniski, 64 and retired from an IT job, funds Old Fulton on his own, though he does accept donations.

He pays $600 a month for cable, $800 a month for electricity; air conditioners are needed to cool his scanners and computers.

Tryniski depends, for the most part, on the kindness of libraries and newspapers. They lend him microfilm. He scans the content and then gives back the microfilm and a copy of the scanned files.

He has pages from nearly 550 New York state newspapers now, and soon there will be Pennsylvania pages online.

There are Democrat and Chronicle pages from 1884 to 1948. Their presence helped me recently in researching Rochester's annexation of the village of Brighton in 1905.

Also archived are many other smaller and now-extinct newspapers from throughout the state. Consequently, anyone whose family has been in New York for a few generations is bound to connect with his or her digitized past.

Poking about, I have found my maternal grandparents' engagement announcement from 1908. My grandmother, who was dead before I was born, is described as a "successful teacher of the East ward school." I like that.

Other searches have revealed news of my mother, father, uncles and aunts — news I had forgotten or never knew.

Often it's the little things in their lives, the kind of items that filled hometown columns filed by local correspondents.

Those little things mean a lot, and thanks to Tom Tryniski, they are there to be found, just a click or two away.

Remarkable Rochesterians

In recognition of the 100th anniversary of Rochester's Memorial Art Gallery, let's add three members of the same family to the list of Remarkable Rochesterians that can be found at RocRoots.com:

George L. Herdle (1868-1922): An artist and friend of artists, he helped found the Memorial Art Gallery in 1913, serving first as acting director and soon becoming director. During his time as director, he championed the acquisition of modern art and staged exhibitions by James McNeill Whistler, George Bellows and other artists.

Gertrude Herdle Moore (1896-1993): Daughter of George L. Herdle, the Memorial Art Gallery's first director, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Rochester in 1918. After her father's death in 1922, she was named director of the gallery at age 25, becoming the youngest museum director in the country. Until her retirement in 1962, she significantly expanded the MAG's collection and its educational outreach.

Isabel C. Herdle (1905-2004): Daughter of George L. Herdle, the first director of the Memorial Art Gallery, and sister of Gertrude Herdle Moore, the MAG's second director, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Rochester and from Harvard University. Beginning in 1932, she served 40 years as a curator at the MAG and with her sister acquired more than 5,000 works of art.