Fishing Heritage Center wants New Bedford fishermen's old logbooks and settlement sheets

NEW BEDFORD New Bedford families holding on to a retired fisherman's logbooks or settlement sheets have a place to take them. The New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center on Bethel Street plans to gather those records, scan and catalog them, and post them in its public online archive.

The center spelled out the work in a fiscal 2026 funding proposal to the city's Community Preservation Committee, which it titled the fourth phase of its archives project. Second on its list of eight tasks is to "Solicit, process, digitize, catalogue, and upload to online archive: logbooks and settlement sheets from retired New Bedford fishermen." Its timeline lists the logbook work as ongoing, beside quarterly targets for other parts of the project.

What the center already holds

Since it opened in 2016, the center has built a collection of "more than 80,000 digital images and over 1000 audio recordings as well as charts, logbooks, tools, and many other objects," the proposal says. The center put its archive online in May 2024, and the proposal counts 5,232 searches since then, an average of 275 a month, along with 25,484 searchable records, 81 hours of oral histories, 190 hours of Working Waterfront Festival recordings and 58 hours of streaming video.

"As word has spread, more community members are accessing the collection and more people are coming forward with materials including some very large and significant collections," the center wrote. "We need additional funding to keep pace with the growth of the collection and time to secure alternate funding to support the work in the future."

What the project costs

The proposal puts the cost of this phase at $81,840, of which $19,100 is in-kind, and asks the committee for $35,000 in Community Preservation Act money. Along with the logbooks, the plan calls for removing mold from the New Bedford Seafood Producers Association scrapbook collection and putting the scrapbooks online a quarter at a time, processing the Lang/Xifares Labor Collection, writing item-by-item descriptions and key words so thousands more photos and documents become publicly accessible, training volunteers and carrying out the Northeast Document Conservation Center's recommendations for backup copies of the digital collection.

The proposal lists who will benefit: fishing family members, students and teachers, journalists, authors, filmmakers, researchers and policy makers. "We are the only institution dedicated to preserving the history of the New Bedford fishing community," the center wrote, adding, "We have the trust, knowledge, and expertise."

How to share family records

People with materials to share can email programs@fishingheritagecenter.org, the center's Community Documentation page says. Staff can scan the originals and return them, or a family can offer the papers as a donation, which the center's Collections Committee reviews at its monthly meeting. The page names the kinds of records the center scans: fishing industry photographs, old and new, and documents such as settlement sheets, union books and news clippings.

The center's monthly Scanning Day, on the second Saturday of each month from 10 a.m. to noon, is on hold while staff work through a backlog in the collections, the page says. When it runs, owners leave with their originals and a flash drive holding the scans.

Connor Gaudet is the center's archivist, at archives@fishingheritagecenter.org. The center is at 38 Bethel St., 508-993-8894, and is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., closed Thanksgiving and Christmas. Admission is $10 for adults and $6 for seniors and students, and children under 12 and members get in free.

More of the waterfront's story

The archive work sits beside the center's oral history projects. Its Fishing Family Businesses Project, supported by a Maritime Heritage Education Grant from the Massachusetts Historical Commission, "seeks to collect and share stories of the multi-generational families who have made New Bedford the nation's most valuable fishing port," the center says. Its Herstory project, begun in 2022, pairs high school and college students with older women who have ties to the fishing community, and the center asks anyone who knows such a woman who might want to share her story to write to herstory@fishingheritagecenter.org.

In its rotating gallery, the center is showing "In History's Wake," an exhibit on the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, the law that set the 200-mile limit. It is on view through spring 2027.

Label: Reported by us, from the town's posted records.