Mrs. Clark has already devoted 175 hours to cataloguing two local scrapbooks in the library's collection, and she has started on a third. News clippings dating back to 1915 and before are indexed in four categories: births, marriages, obituaries, and odds and ends--fires, sentencings, and wedding anniversaries, for example.
       "Carol [Briggs, the Hillsdale librarian] knew I was interested in genealogy, so she suggested that I go through a book of obituaries," says Mrs. Clark. "Then one thing led to another."
       The obituaries Mrs. Clark indexed over a twenty year period that ended in 1991. Her next project was a scrapbook of newspaper clippings covering roughly a thirty-year period from 1915 until 1945.
       The neat, hardbound scrapbook was kept by Mae and Evelyn Niver, sisters who lived in Craryville until their deaths in the 1970s. It contains a total of 2,400 names, including those of local families and more than a few luminaries. Visitors to Hillsdale during those years included Mr. and Mrs. Charles Lindberg, who came for a family wedding, and Presidents Wilson, Coolidge, and Franklin Roosevelt.
       Death notices on file include one for a past editor of the Hillsdale Harbinger, a long-forgotten local newspaper, and another for the notorious murderer Beckwith, who stuffed his victim's arms and legs in a stove.
       Although she never went to those lengths, Mrs. Clark herself has led an unusually colorful life. She was born in Vienna and observed her first birthday in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, her parents having decided to migrate to the United States. She spent the war years 1943 to 1945 as an enlisted member of the WAVES.
       "I started out as an Aviation Machinist's Mate," she says, "but I went into secretarial so I'd be able to find a job when I got out."
       Mrs. Clark and her husband, who was Town Highway Superintendent until his retirement, bought the old parsonage attached to the United Methodist Church in 1974 and moved to Hillsdale in 1976.
       They were still living in Huntington, LI, when they drove past and saw a For Sale sign on the house, says Mrs. Clark. They decided to move because "Huntington was getting kinda crowded."
       Mrs. Clark's current project is a scrapbook donated to the library by Joe and Ruth Oxenhorn, with calligraphy by Dean Inglis augmenting their cut-and-paste work. Entries date from 1925 through the early 1980s.
       The indexed material now forms part of the library's reference collection and is available for use on site. Clippings have been photocopied in order to preserve the originals.