 One aspect of the Relicensing Project for Tuscarora was to develop an oral history document to present to FERC. The purpose of the document was to submit Tuscarora's understanding and history of the period during the Project construction in the late 1950s, early 1960's. While collecting the oral histories, the interviewers found it easier to use old pictures of that time period to jog the elder's memories.
The TEP began collecting old photographs pertaining to this specific time period, putting them together electronically on a power point slideshow that would be shown to each interviewee. As we collected the pictures we also began collecting old pictures of and about Tuscarora in general. Whether old or new, we felt a depository of Tuscarora photography would be beneficial to our community. Around this time a local author was looking to include a chapter about Tuscarora in her Images of America Series book on the Town of Lewiston. She contacted our office and we agreed to provide her pictures of Tuscarora and help her write the Tuscarora chapter. With this experience and her support, the TEP decided we should utilize the pictures we were collecting and write our own Tuscarora book for the Images of America Series called 'Tuscarora Nation.' In October 2006, we submitted our final draft of the Tuscarora Nation book to Arcadia Publishing (you can see the book here). During this process we amassed a large collection of Tuscarora images, but we do not own the originals. To help with collecting the pictures we agreed to collect them electronically, which means we scanned the originals and stored the .tiff and .jpg copies in our office. Currently, the Tuscarora Old Picture Collection has more than 1200 electronic images pertaining to Tuscarora. |