The Fitchburg Historical Society was created on February 15, 1987 with 80 charter members. The city of Fitchburg provided some limited storage space which changed from place to place over the years. Due to this limited space the FHS decided to primarily limit their collection to photographs and documents. The following describes some of the results of our efforts to make our collection widely available using the internet.

Fitchburg Historical Society Website

The Fitchburg Historical Society website was started December 26, 2016 with 5 webpages and received 32 visitors by the end of the year. The following year the number of visitors had increased to 1637 and has continued to increase an average of 35% each year (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Visitors by Year

This increase in visitors is likely due to the continued increase in information. From the initial 5 webpages, we now have a total of 287 webpages in 9 main menus and 43 submenus. While the large majority of visitors are from the United States, there have now been visitors from a total of 82 countries (Figure 2).

 Figure 2. Countries visitors from.

Fitchburg Historical Society YouTube Website

In addition to our FHS Website, we have our FHS YouTube Website which was started in September 2018 with a nonprofit classification. This allows us to publish and store a large collection of videos at no cost.  As of June 2022, this website contains 15 program videos dating from 2007 and 58 interview videos dating from 2015 kindly recorded by Fitchburg’s FACTv. There are generally 2 programs a year and an interview each month with a viewership of 5 to 60 views per video. The videos can be seen either by going to our FHS YouTube website or going to the Video Presentations  webpage on our FHS Website.

Fitchburg Historical Society Newsletters

The first FHS Newsletter was published in April 1989 and mailed to FHS members. This tradition has continued with between 1 and 5 newsletters a year. In April 2022 we published our hundredth newsletter. The large number of FHS members having an email address eventually allowed us to email the newsletters while still mailing the newsletters to a small group of people without email access. In addition, our FHS website has a Database webpage containing links to our photographs, obituary information and newsletters. All our newsletters are compiled by date in one large pdf file. This file can be searched to find articles of interest.