Good news for those of us with ancestors who lived in Maine.
The Maine Historical Society has been awarded a $149,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to digitize, catalogue and provide free online access through Maine Memory Network to 1,000 images in its early Maine collection of photos.
The collection includes daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes dating from about 1845 through the US Civil War, as well as 25,000 glass plate negatives from The Portland Press Herald, from about 1917 to 1940.
My great-great-aunt Isabella Young and her husband Joseph Craig moved from Montreal to Portland in October 1866, three months to the day after the great fire of Portland. No surprise he set up his plastering shop on the outskirts of the destroyed area. In the Maine Memory Network collection of photos, there is an 1892 newspaper photo of Joseph seeing off a group of guests from Montreal. Yes, that made me a happy camper.
