After roughly 70 years, the Oneonta WWII Newspaper Scrapbooks have "gone home."
UPDATE: For over 10 years I have been trying to donate the scrapbooks to the Oneonta Historical Society. This year someone FINALLY got back to me and I handed them over on Thursday Nov. 11, 2017. They are finally back home where they belong. The originals are in the archives at the Historical Society, a copy resides in the Huntington Library.
Update-1/13/2007-the Library contacted me and said they had made acid free copies of the scrapbooks and wanted to return the original books. I have them again.
Some articles from a 1945 scrapbook of clippings from the Oneonta Star can be seen posted online on a Delaware County website. 1945 online It was purchased by people who found it at a flea market outside of Philadelphia several years ago.
I constantly search eBay for material for this website. As luck would have it, someone posted a 1943 scrapbook on Ebay in June 2003. I purchased it, with the intention of helping it "go home" to Oneonta.
When it arrived, we realized that it was created by the same person who created the 1945 book. Indications are that it was created by someone in the Wiltsie family from Southside.
Irene indexed the book to make it easier to find articles and we posted the index on these pages with an offer to scan any articles the people wanted. After sending an email out to the Alumni Association, a number of people contacted me. It was great fun sending these articles out.
One of the people who contacted me was a friend of my Father in Law, Bob Pickard. When I pointed him to Stan's pictures on the website, the first image he saw was the two of them at boot camp. Small world.
We also found the wedding picture of the parents of my wife, Irene's uncle Don, articles about parents of a number of her friends and another relative's (by marriage) wedding picture.
I contacted Joseph Waring and Lodema Jenkins who owned the 1945 book and shared my intentions. They gave me their book-so that both books could "go home" together to Oneonta. Irene indexed that one too-and we sent out a number of scans.
After 59 years, the WWII Scrapbooks of Oneonta Star Newspaper clippings have "gone home." They were donated to Oneonta's Huntington Library's New York State room along with the database so that the material can be used for research and viewing by family members.
The books made the trip back to Oneonta on October 2, 2004 to "visit" with the Alumni at the OHS Homecoming before going to the Library.
Frank Gallucci was kind enough to deliver the books to the Library on October 4 so that Alumni could "visit" with the book at the evening celebration (instead of going to the library on Saturday afternoon). It was a wonderful experience and we are lucky to have been a part of it.
Russ and Irene Padden