Ancient Web: Sharon Wick Made Conneaut History a Free Local Archive

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Sharon Wick was researching ancestors and making websites about places outside Ohio when a question occurred to her: why wasn't she building a free history resource for her own town?

Visit Conneaut History and Genealogy.

The answer became a website in 2002. Its front page still says 'Always Transcribing & Always Free,' and visitors encounter a mixture of handwritten-style introductions, photographs, and dense links. The town sits at the northeastern edge of Ohio, beside Lake Erie, which gives the picture collection a recurring subject: harbor views, lake ice, a lighthouse, ships and changing seasons.

Wick's photographs record remarkably specific days. One image is labelled September 29, 2002; others show ice in February 2003, a ship entering the harbor that April, and a waterspout photographed in 2009 by contributor Dan Anderson. They create an informal environmental diary beside the genealogical records.

An index of the people who lived there

The genealogy table of contents divides resources into births, marriages, deaths, cemeteries, census records, city directories, military service, schools, yearbooks, obituaries and old newspapers. The navigation also leads to historic buildings, bridges and local disasters.

Wick continues explaining her editorial work in the margins. A July 2023 update acknowledges that some old pages were awkwardly sized and positioned, and that she was revising them one at a time, starting with cemetery material. She invites readers to request specific lookups and says she will try to locate records not already posted.

A notice about missing nineteenth-century issues of the Ashtabula Telegraph adds another preservation angle: volunteers needed people holding surviving copies so the county genealogical society could microfilm them.

Not every inherited link is current, and dates on the photographs are not proof that every page has remained unchanged since 2002. The handwritten warnings about pop-up blockers and slow-loading videos nevertheless retain a recognizable early-Web character.

Browse the local records and image collections.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.