The Wethersfield Historical Society is hosting a talk by the book's authors, Beverly Lucas and Melissa Josefiak, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Admission is $5 for adults and free to society members and children under 16.
Lucas is the former curator at the Wethersfield Historical Society. Josefiak is the assistant director of the Society. They will be signing copies of the book at the event.
Arcadia Publishing, which produces the Images of America series for many communities, had been interested for years in doing one for Wethersfield, explained Josefiak.
"We put them off and put them off and finally last year [former Society director] Doug Shipman said with the 375th anniversary coming up this would be the perfect way to celebrate," she said.
They started the process of collecting the photos for the book on April 1, 2008, sorting through the 1,000 or so in the Society's collection. However, the collection at that time only spanned from the 1860s to the 1930s, Josefiak said.
"We wanted to update it to reflect the modern history of Wethersfield today, especially to reflect the racial, cultural, and ethnic diversity in town in recent decades," she said.
So they sent out word to the community - bring out your old family photographs. They held "scanning parties" to make digital copies of the photos and take down the background information on each.
People were happy to cooperate, knowing that their photos might be in the book or the accompanying exhibit, she said. Altogether they collected more than 500 new pictures of life in Wethersfield over the years, although only about half made it into the book.
Josefiak described how Lucas had to cull through all the photos and information quickly to get the draft of the book to the publisher by the July 1, 2008 deadline. The book came out on Dec. 1, 2008.
She said she and her fellow author will be talking about the "the 'ah ha!' moments - photos of things we had heard about but never seen an image of, what got us excited."
The talk will be illustrated with slides of the many photos collected. The Historical Society also has an ongoing exhibition called "Wethersfield - Images of American," with over 100 photos from 1860s through today. The exhibit opened in September and will run through 2010 at the Keeney Center, 200 Main St.
For more information, call the Wethersfield Historical Society at (860) 529-7656 or visit www.wethhist.org.