Local history buffs are turning to Facebook to share memories of bygone eras

Social media has a reputation for capturing ephemeral thoughts and images, but around the world, people are using Facebook for a different purpose, setting up groups to record and share images and memories of the past.

Facebook history groups and pages have popped up in major cities like New York and Seattle and in small towns and suburbs across the U.S. Other groups focus on the histories of hobbies and interests from ham radio to cooking to punk rock, but geographical groups in particular often collect unique information that may not be found anywhere else on the internet. Members share personal photos, family stories, and ephemera tied to places in their hometowns from former schools to businesses that have changed hands.

“There’ll be a corner store, and we have one name for it, and then people remember all of the owners over time,” says John Marks, curator of collections and exhibits at Historic Geneva, a museum in Geneva, New York, that operates a Facebook page with frequent historic discussions. 

Historic Geneva frequently digitizes and posts photos from its collection of tens of thousands, and residents chime in with their own memories of bars, church groups, neighborhoods, and businesses, sometimes connecting with former neighbors in comment sections or following up with Historic Geneva to share details or artifacts with the museum. 

“Say I post a picture of a factory that was here, and they say, ‘you know, my mom worked there, and I have X, Y and Z from that factory,'” Marks says. “I’ll reply to the post and say if you ever want to donate it, we’d love to have you give me a call.”

Marks says he typically spends a few hours a month preparing and scheduling posts, researching what the museum knows about particular images to caption them as best as possible. He’ll also try to record information Facebook users share about what he posts if it seems reliable, like the names of former owners of a business. 

And while some history pages are run by professional historians or museum workers like Marks, many others are run by amateurs who essentially volunteer their time to moderate posts, removing spam and other unwanted content like political arguments from groups that in some cases have hundreds of thousands of members.

“It never stops,” says Mike McGinness, who founded a Florida history group that now has more than 300,000 members and 75,000 photos. “It’s a full-time job, just keeping the group civil, and keeping the group on track as to what our focus is.” 

Photos posted in the group have helped old friends and even family members reconnect, he says, and well-captioned posts can be searched by users looking to find information about particular buildings or addresses. And about three years ago, McGinness and his co-admin Jeff Davies were contacted by publisher McIntyre Purcell, which led to a coffee table-style book of historic photos of Florida they’ve since promoted at bookstores, houses of worship, universities, and festivals up and down the Sunshine State.

“We’ve been, you know, promoting not even necessarily the book, but the Facebook group, and our brand of preserving Florida history,” says Davies. “It’s always good to sell a book, but it’s also good to preserve history, so 20, 30, or 40 years from now, if someone’s driving down the street anywhere in Florida and they look at a building, they could see what was there before.”

‘It’s really hard to get a hold of any support from Facebook’

Most Facebook history groups are probably run by inspired amateurs like McGinness and Davies, not professional historians, says Mark Tebeau, an associate professor at Arizona State University’s School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies and the coauthor of the Handbook of Digital Public History. And they help connect members with historical memories and materials in a way that local historical societies and museums might struggle to do, since they have limited budgets and space to archive and exhibit community materials at scale.

The trouble is, Tebeau says, Facebook itself isn’t designed to be a historical archive. It’s not necessarily easy to browse or search material posted to Facebook groups, unless captions match search terms fairly precisely, and the lack of public APIs make it difficult for researchers to systematically access material stored on the site. 

“These kinds of channels are not interested in these kinds of open internet practices that would be required for archivists like me to actually harvest and gather material from local communities,” Tebeau says.

Permissions and copyright issues can also make it difficult for professional historians to systematically archive or use material from Facebook, Tebeau says. It’s also not at all clear that Meta intends Facebook to be a long-term historical repository or what will become in the long run of one-of-a-kind photos and recollections shared exclusively on the site.

“I think people mistakenly think Facebook is forever, and it’s not,” he says.

Meta didn’t respond to inquiries from Fast Company. But it’s clear that moderators of history groups have challenges getting help from the company, as is common with services from Meta  and other big tech companies. 

“It’s really hard to get a hold of any support from Facebook,” McGinness says. “We’ve had quite a few glitches happen with our group, and we’ve tried to communicate with them, and it’s very difficult.”

He and Davies try to control who’s admitted to the group, weeding out obviously suspicious users with new accounts and no ties to Florida, and using moderation tools to flag posts with vulgarity and removing offenders, but McGinness says spammers do sometimes manage to slip into the group through means unknown. “Mike and I have spent hours and hours going through members, trying to remove the ones that have slipped in,” he says.

And at the same time, bogus Florida history groups have popped up, sometimes using photos taken without attribution from their group, which they post intermixed with spam, Davies says.

Other history groups and pages have struggled with cybersecurity issues, sometimes losing control of their groups to hackers. A Seattle group was hijacked last year, and, according to news reports, the administrators struggled to get the attention of Facebook or law enforcement until someone offered to connect them with a Meta employee, who was able to help restore access. The group admins didn’t respond to inquiries from Fast Company.

A Facebook page belonging to the Illinois State Historical Society, which has been active on the site for about 15 or 20 years, was similarly hacked last year, says executive director William Furry. The page had promoted historical content, events, and anniversaries from around the state, including promoting news from other historical societies in the state with limited resources for advertising. The historical society also saw some of its own content go viral, with plenty of comments from readers, including posts about the Radium Girls poisoned on the job in the early 20th century as they painted glow-in-the-dark clocks with the radioactive element. 

But when the hackers took over, they shortened the page name, removing mention of Illinois, and started posting a flood of Star Wars trivia and memes.

“The good news is it wasn’t worse than that,” Furry says.

The hijacked page is now operated as Star Wars Society, albeit with a link to the historical society website and Furry’s email address still posted. And while the real historical society has since started a new page, it hasn’t regained a full complement of followers. There’s some stigma to being hacked, with followers potentially concerned they’ll be more vulnerable by association, Furry says. And the group never regained access to its old content, though Furry says he considered everything posted on the page to be “ephemeral” to begin with, serving a purpose of bringing historical information to those who see it. 

“What I want to emphasize is that the problem for me is that there is no help from the Meta organization to stop this sort of thing,” he says. “It’s all on the victim for trying to resolve the problem, and there’s no effort on the part of Meta to go after the perpetrators.”

In general, even without security issues, Facebook history groups and pages tend, like other online forums, to rely on a degree of volunteer admin work that may not be obvious to casual visitors and posters. 

“It’s a labor of love,” says Rebecca Heimbuck, who spends a couple of hours a day administering the group “Billings, Montana As She Was & Is.”

Heimbuck says she started the group partly to share her collection of historic postcards—”you can sit and look at your own stuff—what’s the fun in that?” she says—and partly to help dispel a notion that Billings is less historically interesting than other Montana cities. She made an effort to add detailed captions about the images she’d post, and she’s seen a steady stream of other people join to share their own memories and snapshots of Billings, adding more than 22,000 members in about three years.

“So, as long as there’s an interest and as long as people like it, I hope to keep it up as long as I can,” she says.

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