This year, 2019, is the centennial of a law that created the post of local government historian for each city, town, or village in the state; New York was the first state to do so. Christopher Philippo, on this week’s podcast, talks about his work for a former state historian, collating and cataloging the annual reports of local government historians, the cruel irony being that decades of reports from the keepers of history were lost while others were nonexistent to begin with. Philippo looked up Altamont’s first village historian, as reported in The Enterprise: May R. Silvernail. The state historian in 1919, James Sullivan, saw local historians as instrumental in collecting information from municipalities on New York’s role in World War I. Philippo said many of these first historians, like Silvernail, were women, and the history they collected involved efforts on the home front as well. The Enterprise wrote of Silvernail’s efforts: “This record will include army and navy enlistments, records made in Liberty loan, Red Cross and War stamp drives and other campaigns, and any other items which will show our village’s part in winning the war.” Philippo, a trustee of the Bethlehem Historical Association, also talked about the association’s recent purchases of ephemera of Maria Becker, a schoolteacher and the daughter of a prominent Bethlehem farmer who lived at Becker’s Corners in the mid-19th Century. Philippo found on eBay over 200 letters written to Becker, most recently kept in a cellar in Maine, and three of Becker’s diary, in a cellar in Philadelphia. All of the documents are now in the schoolhouse, owned by the historical association, where Becker once taught.