About 35 years ago, Robin Massa helped her daughter create a family tree for school. Soon, she was helping strangers on online forums research ancestors who might have once lived in Ancram.
Today, Massa is Ancram’s town historian. She collects and catalogs old documents and photographs so that future generations have a place to look when they have questions about the town.
Massa is among more than 1,600 local historians in New York, which is the only state that requires municipalities and counties to have such a position. Municipal boards decide the scope and resources assigned to historians, though the law does not mandate a salary or include enforcement measures, leaving some positions vacant. The historians’ work often aims to build a sense of pride and community among residents.
Among Dutchess County’s 20 towns, four have a salary line for the historian in their 2027 town budgets: Stanford ($2,650), Milan ($1,500), Pawling ($1,500), and Hyde Park ($300). In Milan, the role was unpaid until 2026, when the Town Board allocated a $6,000 salary for Vicky LoBrutto. She resigned last month after the board reduced the figure to align with budgets in neighboring towns.
“We decided that our town history was important, we wanted to pay for it, but it needed to be a commensurate wage to what other towns are paying,” Town Board member Kevin Pike said. “So we’re paying the second-highest salary for the position in the county.”
Gov. Al Smith established the municipal historian role in 1919 to collect information on returning World War I veterans and to document the conflict’s impact on communities. Today, they work on researching, preserving, and promoting local historic records and sites for tourism, said Fulton (N.Y.) County historian Samantha Hall-Saladino, who also serves as president of the New York Association of Public Historians.
“If we don’t know our history, we repeat it,” Saladino said. “Having an appointed person whose responsibility it is to make sure that not only is our history being preserved, but that we are using those past lessons to move forward in the world — that’s what historians do.”
Municipal historians’ roles vary widely across towns. In Stanford, the biggest part of Kathie Spiers’ job is to maintain the seven abandoned cemeteries and manage the $15,000 cemetery budget. Spiers hires tree trimmers and landscapers to clear the leaves and weeds and mow the grass. For the past decade, Spiers has also cleaned the gravestones using an organic solution with the help of volunteers from the Stanford Historical Society. (Spiers is vice president.) Over the years, she said, she has grown attached to people buried there, even though they died long before her lifetime.
At her Town Hall office, which she shares with the town’s planning and zoning boards, Spiers maintains numerous binders organized by topic, with documents that were digitized with the help of the Dutchess County historian’s office. One of Spiers’ favorite documents is a book containing records of Town Board meetings from 1793, when Stanford was first established. It also describes the town’s roads and provides a list of homeowners. She often turns to it when residents or prospective buyers want to know who lived in a house generations ago.
Earlier this year, Spiers worked with the William Pomeroy Foundation to get historic markers for the Carpenter Burying Ground and the Ezra Thompson home, which dates back to the 1700s. She also maintains a collection of photographs, journals, and other artifacts for the Stanford Historical Society, and helps preserve buildings like the Attlebury Schoolhouse on Route 82. If someone wants to see rare paintings or school trophies from the 1800s, Spiers is the person to ask.
“I think of her as this scribe figure, where she takes in an enormous amount of information and is able to really steward it and be the go-to resource,” Town Supervisor Julia Descoteaux said.
In the last two months, Gallatin Town Historian Louisa Ruby organized a talk on the region’s last Taghkanic basketmaker and gave a presentation on Gallatin in the 18th century, where she discussed old area maps and the region’s indigenous history. The maps, she said, are especially informative and help trace historical town divisions, houses and their owners, mills, and railroads. She hopes to arrange more gatherings that give residents a reason to socialize and connect with their neighbors.
“Gallatin has no center,” Ruby said. “Some lectures and events would make Gallatin more of a community. That’s the ultimate goal, besides my own interest.”
Ruby, who splits her time between Brooklyn and Gallatin, holds a Ph.D. in art history. Her position is voluntary, with money set aside for contractual expenses and a display cabinet. An important part of her job, she said, is to organize the town’s historic materials so that researchers and interested residents can access them.
One of Ruby’s biggest initiatives is an oral history project: She interviews longtime residents and encourages them to donate old photographs to the town’s archives. The collection includes photocopies of the Silvernails railway station from the early 1900s and suffragettes stationed in front of the former Gallatin post office. Ruby is trying to track down the houses in the town’s historic photo collection and interview their current owners. She hopes to add the recordings to the town’s history website.
This year, Ruby said she started reading a 190-page typewritten journal from 1932 by historian Edith Harrison, who chronicled how people lived and farmed in the 19th century, what kind of utensils they used, and what flowers and trees grew nearby. Ruby plans to write a blog for the town website detailing the insights she gleaned from the journal.
Town historians often return to old binders that their predecessors collected to find new ways to share town history with residents. Sometimes though, history shows up in unexpected places, hidden in old barns and long-forgotten corners of ancestral homes.
One of the most exciting discoveries in Pine Plains came in the late 1990s, when a family found local government meeting records dating back to the 1700s in their barn, said Dyan Wapnick, president of the Little Nine Partners Historical Society. (In Pine Plains, the historian role is supported by the society, on a volunteer basis. The town budgets a stipend for supplies.)
The Dutchess County historian’s office helped digitize the meeting records a few years ago, but the paper documents are delicate, Wapnick said. She stores them in fireproof filing cabinets at the Graham Brush House and Town Hall and hopes to one day keep them in a climate-controlled space.
For Wapnick, the most enjoyable part of her work is sharing the town’s history through events like the annual Lantern Tour at Evergreen Cemetery, in which attendees learn about local characters through historical reenactments and period costumes.
“They love learning about what people in the community were like 100 or more years ago,” Wapnick said. “It just gives them a sense of place, and I think people crave that.”
In Milan, LoBrutto spent the past year developing the Rev250 program and highlighting Milan’s veterans from the American Revolution. During her roughly eight-year tenure, she worked to preserve furniture from the county-owned Wilcox House and gathered books, newspaper clippings, and records on historic structures like the Shookville church ruins. LoBrutto said she also started a project chronicling immigration in Milan since its founding in 1818. The documents are kept in archival boxes at Town Hall, including a vault in the community room.
“As you go through the archives, you look at pictures recognizing our Revolutionary War soldiers, it comes alive for you,” LoBrutto said.
She served as the clerk to the former supervisor Alfred LoBrutto, her husband, from 2019 to 2025. During those years, her historian role was unpaid. When he resigned as supervisor at the end of 2025, she stepped down from her clerk position but continued as town historian. Milan’s 2026 budget set her historian salary at $6,000, which she said reflected her Rev250 work and carried over from her clerk pay. She acknowledged that her salary was higher than usual but felt that the $1,500 budgeted for next year would not be enough compensation for the role.
“I have to give the board credit,” she said. “It’s unprecedented, it’s very progressive, and it is a lot more money than what other historians are getting in the county.”
Ancram’s preliminary 2027 budget includes a historian salary of $2,960. Massa assumed the role in 2024 but has been involved with the work for decades. One of her first projects was to trace the genealogy of names mentioned on a signature quilt donated to the town. Her office also has VHS tapes and numerous acid-free archival boxes that help preserve items such as an antique wedding dress and a fur coat that belonged to a murder victim. In 1949, Massa said, resident Alonzo Cook was shot and his house set on fire to cover the crime. Cook’s family later donated his coat to the town, she said.
Massa hopes to leave behind a collection that is easy to search and helps future generations imagine the lives of the people who lived in town before them.
“It’s like the things that I have in my house that have been in my family for generations,” she said. “My children are not interested in it. So I’ve told them that when something happens to me, I would like them to donate whatever is pertinent to the town of Ancram, as history.”