GUILDERLAND — Ann Wemple-Person, Guilderland Public Library’s local history librarian, was approved Tuesday night as Guilderland’s new town historian.

Wemple-Person succeeds Alice Begley, who started as historian more than two decades ago. The post has been empty since Begley’s retirement, which took effect at the end of 2016.

“You probably couldn’t design a better candidate,” said Supervisor Peter Barber of Wemple-Person. “She has a wonderful, outgoing personality.” He said that Begley is “very excited” about the choice of Wemple-Person too.

“Alice has been doing it for so long that it’s a little daunting, filling her shoes,” Wemple-Person said.

She said that her work at the library and her role as town historian will complement one another, although she was quick to point out that she will be careful not to blur the lines between the time she devotes to each. She said, “I’m not going to be working on town historian projects while I’m here [at the library], and vice versa.”

Wemple-Person knows her way around the resources available to help her answer library patrons’ questions about history, whether that means consulting a book or calling Begley or Mary Ellen Johnson, vice president of the town’s historical society.

In the past, she said, Begley, Johnson, and others such as Carol Hamblin, Anita Collins, and the Altamont Museum and Archives have been very helpful with questions that have left her “stumped,” and she hopes that she can continue to call on them in her new role as well.

She showed The Enterprise an example of a book in the library’s local history collection in the Tawasentha Room. “Maybe I’m morbid,” she said, “but I think this is interesting.” It was a record of burials at the Prospect Hill Cemetery in Guilderland between 1858 and 1902, and what was remarkable about the book is that it gives the cause of death: consumption, drowned, shot “accidently.”

Other resources she sometimes uses include Bible records put together by the state’s Daughters of the American Revolution Old Hellebergh Chapter, marriage records of the Helderberg Reformed Church, and a fat volume on the history of Albany County.

Barber said that, when Begley informally announced her resignation, a few months before she left, he asked her to look around for people who might replace her. She came up with a few names, and Barber then encouraged those people to apply.

At one point, he checked with library Director Timothy Wiles to make sure that he would not mind Wemple-Person taking on the extra work, and Wiles was fine with it, he said.

Wiles told The Enterprise that he was “delighted for all parties — for Ann, and for the town, and for the library.”

Her appointment, Wiles said, is “indicative of the vastly improved relationship between the library and the town.”

Wiles said that both Wemple-Person and Barber had a lot to do with that improved relationship.

Wemple-Person worked together with Mary Ann Kelley, the town’s coordinator for senior services, and put in a “leave-one, take-one” free-books bookshelf at the town’s new senior center. And the town’s senior van, Wiles continued, now makes a trip to the library twice a month, so that town residents who no longer drive can still visit. “Under the town’s previous administration, that was deemed too expensive,” Wiles said.

Library work complementary

At the library, Wemple-Person also serves as a reference librarian and as an outreach librarian.

As an outreach librarian, she creates programs, “usually on topics I’ve just recently learned about, that I think are interesting,” she said. She also goes out into the community “to let people know that we exist,” she said, to publicize the many free services and programs the library offers, and to let people know ”we welcome everyone; it doesn’t matter what your family looks like or your background is.”

This past weekend, she and other librarians set up a table at which they helped children make crafts at Hannaford Kidz Expo at the Empire State Plaza; this spring they will attend the Tulip Festival in Albany’s Washington Park and the Lupine Fest at the Pine Bush Discovery Center.

“You can come to the library without coming through the physical doors,” she said, noting that, on the library’s website, people can “download books and magazines, and learn languages.”

There are several reasons why the library conducts outreach beyond the borders of Guilderland, Wemple-Person said. It gives the Guilderland librarians a chance to partner with other local libraries that are also members of the Upper Hudson Library System to which Guilderland belongs.

“It reminds people that they’re not restricted, and that there are 29 libraries that they can use,” she said.

Barber said that he hopes Wemple-Person will “continue the success that Alice had” —  looking to advance the completion of the renovations of the Schoolcraft House (located at Route 20 and Willow Street) and also working with the Mynderse-Frederick House (on Route 146 in Guilderland Center). He added, “There’s a number of other historic structures in town too.”

Barber will look to Wemple-Person for new ways to promote, “particularly to a new generation,” the historic structures in town; he also plans to ask her, he said, to look into “different programs or activities that we might want to start hosting at those buildings.”

Wemple-Person said she has some ideas that she has not yet had a chance to discuss with Barber. For instance, she said, she would like to use Alice Begley’s book about Guilderland’s historical markers as a springboard for creating an interactive social-media platform that people could use either on-site or at home to learn about those areas or properties.

Wemple-Person views history, she said, as “not just a celebration of what has been, but what is now.” The town is “so diverse now” as compared to when she grew up here, “and I just love it,” she said.

She is interested in charting not only the past, but also the present. “History is a constant; it just happened. It’s right there,” she said.

Family

Wemple-Person grew up in Guilderland, and her parents still live in town. Her father, John Wemple, retired as executive director of medical assistance for Albany County and is a member of Guilderland’s Environmental Conservation Advisory Council. Her mother, Rebecca Wilma Wemple, is a retired registered nurse who is originally from England.

“Both of my parents are very service-oriented,” she said, “and taught me to take care of people.”

She hopes that “being able to bring everybody’s story together as part of the history of the town is very important. I don’t necessarily mean sitting down and taking someone’s family history, but including everybody in the town — all the families, all the backgrounds — into the narrative of the town.”

Wiles told The Enterprise that the Wemple family history has been traced back, in the area, to the 1600s. Wemple-Person said that it had, to 1642, and that her father and her aunt, Joan W. Burns, are the main family historians.

Wemple-Person, 43, is married to Alex Person, a farmer who until several years ago operated Full Circle Farm and Forestry in Middleburgh. She would help him after work, which was “meditative,” she said. She now knows how to wrangle chickens and drive a tractor. The couple had started a community-supported agriculture, or CSA, program, selling vegetables, herbs, and meat birds, and had a few customers.

They were in the process of trying to buy the land that they were farming, but the deal fell through, Wemple-Person said, which was “surprising and devastating” to them. Now Alex Person lives four hours away, farming land downstate in Allegany County that he was able to get from a relative. They travel back and forth often. They have a dog but no children, she said.

Wemple-Person fully supports her husband’s desire to keep working as a farmer, which she says is “his profession.” She said that the couple is trying to find affordable land closer to home, although farmable land “is not cheap” here.

Under the name Full Circle farm and Forestry, her husband continues to sell farm products, like the maple syrup he is producing “right now, like literally right now,” Wemple-Person said this week.

Wemple-Person wasn’t able to attend the town board meeting at which she was approved as historian. She had already arranged to attend a workshop that evening for librarians and others interested in finding out more about the archives at the Museum of Innovation and Science and the Dudley Observatory in Schenectady.

The position of town historian is stipended. In 2016, it paid $2,327, said Stacia Brigadier, the town’s personnel administrator.