WILLIAMSTOWN — A Lasell College professor with Williamstown roots and his students have presented the Williamstown House of Local History and the town with a database that was hailed at its presentation as a boon to genealogists.
The professor is Richard Dodds Jr., whose parents, Dick and Meg Dodds, are active in the House of Local History. And Dick Dodds, a retired Mount Greylock Regional High School English teacher, was among four volunteers updating records for the oldest part of Eastlawn Cemetery. The others are Annette Jenks, Carole Welsh and Kay Sherman.
“This will be fantastic for genealogists,†said Town Clerk Mary C. Kennedy at Dodds’ presentation at the Milne Public Library Monday.
“Once we have this, we’ll wonder how we ever got along without it,†said Parks and Cemeteries Superintendent Chris Lemoine. “This helps everybody – families doing research, genealogists, funeral directors.â€
Library Director Pat MacLeod said the database will be valuable to the library.
“This’ll be a wonderful thing to have,†she said.
Volunteers last summer surveyed the old section and the cloverleaf at Eastlawn, recording 91 pages of information detailing the 475 lots, 1,595 monuments with inscriptions in five languages for 1,426 deceased people, including 55 veterans.
Dodds, who graduated from Mount Greylock Regional High School in 1980 and Williams College in 1984, has a master’s in education degree from Harvard University and teaches computers at Lasell College in Newton.
“We want people to be able to get to this data,†he said. “Someone doing genealogy and hunting an ancestor can click it and print it in Australia.â€
The database, he said, will encompass more records that can be pulled as needed and give stronger “data integrity.†Dodds was accompanied by students from his course in database management and design, Cynthia Chou, Edin Rizvanbegovic and Ken Wu, who have worked on the database for the past seven weeks. Seven of the nine students in the course signed up for service learning, work that benefits a community. The database was built after conferring with House of Local History members and town officials on the information they wanted to be included.
People seeking a relative can, for example, proceed with only one name, if that is all they have. George, for example, will appear in a table, designed as first name, last name or middle name. Veterans can be sorted according to the wars they fought in. For example, two veterans, William B. Sherman and Levi Deacon Smedley, fought in the Revolutionary War, and Smedley fought again in the War of 1812, among four local War of 1812 veterans. The cemetery also holds 38 from the Civil War, one from the Spanish-American War, six from World War I, two from World War II, and two from unknown conflicts. One of those two, Marion Kerr, is presumed to be from World War I because he served with the 301st Ambulance Co., A.E.F. [American Expeditionary Force], which fought in that conflict.
Lemoine also noted that medical researchers and historians can use the information to track epidemics.
“In two years [in the town’s early history], 50 children died,†he said.
People can also be found through their affiliations, such as the GAR [Grand Army of the Republic]. While more than 900 inscriptions are in English, as could be expected, a handful were in French, and one each were in Danish, German and Latin.
The database was scheduled to be installed early this week. The next cemetery to be included in the database is Southlawn, being surveyed by volunteers from the South Williamstown Historical Committee.
That project is twofold. The Community Preservation Act Committee has also recommended a $35,000 grant to restore and reset gravestones in Southlawn.
There is an earlier link between Lasell College and Williamstown. The college was founded by Edward Lasell, a graduate of Williams and a former professor here, who is buried in the Williams College cemetery and for whom Lasell Gymnasium is named.
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Former Harry's Supermarket Under Construction for Restaurant
Late last month, the Conservation Commission greenlit some tree pruning on the property. New windows and a new door can be seen in the front of the building.
"It's a substantial renovation that's currently underway here," Brent White of White Engineering said, speaking on behalf of the applicant and owner, Huajie Zhu.
A fire gutted the longtime Wahconah Street supermarket in 2023, and the following year, Zhu purchased the property for $460,000 two years ago to build a restaurant with hibachi in the existing footprint of the more than 100-year-old building.
White explained that the project has been ongoing for over a year, and the Community Development Board granted the property a waiver to reduce the minimum required number of parking spaces so that additional spaces aren't needed.
He noted that, looking at the site plan, there is very little room to do so. A mirror will be installed near the sharp turn on Bel Air Avenue to alleviate traffic concerns.
Pruning will be done on trees in the southeast corner of the existing paved parking lot, as a number of branches are hanging over. The new owners also intend to patch, sealcoat, and re-stripe the parking lot.
A fire tore through the building less than an hour after the supermarket closed for the day three years ago. An automatic sprinkler system is required for the new use.
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Brayden Durant struck out seven and walked one in a complete-game effort on the mound Saturday to pitch the Drury baseball team to a 6-0 win over Keefe Tech in the quarter-finals of the Division 5 State Tournament at Joe Wolfe Field. click for more
Jason Codey struck out 13, walked two and allowed just an infield single as the Generals earned a 7-1 win over Wahconah to claim their third straight regional title. click for more
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For the boys, Ward Bianchi helped lead the way with a win in the shot put and a second place in the javelin as the Mounties finished 16 points ahead of runner-up Pittsfield (pending the results of the pole vault, which were unavailable at 11 p.m. Friday night). click for more
