Once something is in the past, you can’t change it. But you can learn from it, pulling together the myriad pieces and presenting them through a lens that tells a story relevant to the present. But how you do that? Well, that’s where the creativity — and responsibility — thrive at the Shelter Island History Museum. It’s also what gets executive director Nanette Lawrenson out of bed every day for the last 14 years she’s been on the job.
The museum’s former incarnation, Shelter Island Historical Society, was formed in 1922 and attracted dedicated preservationists doing the kind of work that is often unseen (and, quite frankly, unthanked). Under Lawrenson’s guidance, a world-class renovation and addition were completed, a farmers market was born and the organization switched to museum status at the end of 2024. Among the many projects she’s overseen and championed, Lawrenson’s quick to point out the work of her staff and many volunteers.
With 8,000-plus artifacts and over 10,000 documents (and growing) properly archived and preserved to museum standards, the SIHM is indeed a treasure trove of stories. We caught up with Lawrenson to talk about the past, present and very exciting future of preserving it all.
How do you not just protect, but use your artifacts and papers as portals to the past for the public?
We’ve been passionate about focusing our exhibits, whether they’re online or physical exhibits that you come and see, so they’re telling Shelter Island stories, and we’re combining the documents with artifacts and furnishings. We have learned it’s very important to put those together to tell a story and include in where we can, living-history videos of people from Shelter Island telling their own stories in their own words.
SIHM embraces technology in its archives to properly store and preserve artifacts indefinitely. How else has technology helped in the mission of history centers?
We have a number of parts to our exhibits that are digital art. We have our online exhibits. Right now, we’re looking very closely at interviews [from the Living History Project] that we could take segments from and start using them as parts of future exhibits.
How has it hurt?
One of the greatest challenges, and it’s all history museums now, is that from, let’s say the 1970s to today, people stopped letter writing, so we’re not collecting documents. And we’re struggling with trying to figure out how to collect images so we have them in the collection for someone to look at 10, 30, 40 years from now. There’s a real void and it’s a real challenge. So much is on social media, email, texting. We need a way of collecting that information. I happened to [talk with] someone who was having a family reunion and I asked her to take lots of pictures and she said, “Oh, well, we’re going to do a family cloud to keep them on that.” Well, that’s great, but doesn’t provide the museum with archival documentation. We’re really trying to talk about that and find a solution.
Where else do you see opportunities to record our history?
Clothing! Our clothing collection, which is fabulous, stops in the 1900s. What about all that polyester that we wore in the ‘60s? Someone said to me, “Yeah, but that wasn’t well-made clothing.” And I’m like: Well, that’s part of the story! It’s what we wore.
People may think of history centers as dusty spots where nothing changes, but on the East End they are pretty vibrant in programming. There always seems to be something going on.
When I started here I’d tell my friends, “You’ve got to come in!” and they’d say, “Oh, we were there in fourth grade!” It’s important to have repetitive visits and something new and different to offer, and we’ve learned that. We have two major exhibits a year, multiple smaller exhibits that change on a more frequent basis and, of course, exhibits online. We have what’s new in the archives. We have what we found in the collection, and we put those things out there. There are “wow” moments every day. We’re in the archives, looking, researching something, and we come across this other gem of information and we’re like, “Wow, look at this!” We put stories out there.
