Guemes Island Library and Historical Society Merge!

Guemes Island Historical Society (GIHS) and Guemes Island Library (GIL) Merge!

With the sad events of the passing away of both Tom Deach and Win Anderson and the desire for other members of the GIHS board to step down for personal reasons, the boards of GIHS and GIL have decided to merge the two organizations and operate under the non-profit (501 (c) 3) umbrella of the library. The library board is committed to continuing the current history projects, maintaining designated bank accounts for history projects and to encouraging people to step forward to work on preserving and advancing the hard historic preservation work of the past twenty plus years.  

GIL and GIHS have been working closely together for a few years. Together, we received a grant from the Washington State Library’s Rural Digitization Project to digitize and upload historic documents and pictures from Guemes Island (https://washingtonruralheritage.org/). This is an ongoing project that Klaudia Englund has volunteered to continue, along with using her library archivist skills to archive the myriad documents and photos in the history collection. She is new to the island and welcomes all island knowledge holders to help. 

For several years, a workspace—aka the History Hut—and a container full of historical artifacts has been housed at the Deach place on Edens Road. Tom’s widow has other plans for the space and the Guemes Island Church has generously offered temporary space in which to continue the archival and digitization work. 

There will be much work to be done and lots of possibilities—so, please come and help form what those will be! There will be meetings in September and October to begin this process.

The Future of Guemes History
Meeting postponed until October 17–look for details in a few weeks.