I have lived on Quaker Meetinghouse Road my entire life. As far as I knew there was nothing much here except for wood lots until the developments of the 1970s and 80s. I didn’t question that understanding until I stumbled across a photograph of a farmhouse with trellised flowers bordering the porch. On the back of that photograph was a note that read simply: “the Hermitage.” I later came across a series of photographs in the Sandwich Town Archives that included the same flowe

If you’ve walked through Sandwich village, you’ve likely noticed the white storefront with the big windows at the corner of Jarves and Main Streets. When the owner expressed interest in obtaining a historic marker, I dove into the records in search of the build date and original owner. I’m dating myself, but what began as routine research turned into a fun ride in Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine. The more I found the more I wanted to know.

After my husband and I moved to Sandwich in 2020 I found myself with time on my hands. It was the height of the pandemic and, like everyone else, we were in lockdown. So I turned to one of my newer interests: genealogy. I decided to dig into my father’s side of the family. My dad grew up in the Newton area, the younger half-brother to three much older siblings. My impression is that school wasn’t exactly his thing (the story goes that he was invited to three different class r

While attending Salem State University for my undergraduate degree in public history, I was fortunate to secure an internship in the archives of Salem Maritime National Historic Site, the nation’s oldest national historic site. One of my key tasks was digitizing and identifying their image collection, which includes thousands of photographs, slides and postcards. I spent countless hours online toggling between Historic Aerials and Google Street View, painstakingly shifting my

Sandwich of the late 1940s — World War II was over, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany vanquished, the population of around 2,400 people was...

Many years ago, in the fall of 1993 to be exact, I left my job at Boston College Library and returned home to Sandwich where we had lived...