This year, the Boothbay Register, which was first published in 1876, celebrates its sesquicentennial. In early 2025, the Boothbay Register and the Boothbay Region Historical Society, funded by a generous grant from the Mildred H. McEvoy Foundation, embarked on a collaborative effort to digitize the Register from its first publication down to the present.

This collaboration, now 14 months old, has reached an important milestone.  With well over a third of the Registers now scanned, our organizations have decided to make the presently digitized volumes available immediately for research by the public.  New volumes will be made available as they are digitized. 

Once digitization is complete, the full archive will be available through the Register with a paid subscription and through the Historical Society with a similar arrangement, allowing one to read and research the archive from the comfort of home. 

The digitized Registers can be accessed on three public computers at the Historical Society and on another public computer at the office of the Boothbay Register. The Historical Society, at 72 Oak Street, is open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, as well as on Wednesday by appointment only.  The Register’s office, at 97 Townsend Avenue, is open from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.  You are encouraged to call to make an appointment to ensure access to a research computer. 

At its office, the Register has created the Boothbay Register-Boothbay Region Historical Society Reading Room.  All existing physical copies of the Register, including those belonging to the Historical Society, are now stored at the Register, where they can be consulted in the new Reading Room along with the digital copies. 

At each location, there will be instructions on how to conduct a digital search of the Register and a list of currently digitized volumes.  At present, these include nearly every year from 1876 through 1925 and from 1956 through 1983, as well as from 2013 to the present, with new volumes being added every month. 

Imagine being able, with a few keystrokes, to find every mention of your ancestors in the Register.  If you were to search for “Pinkham,” for example, you would be presented with a list informing you that this well-known local name appears 13,501 times in the 55 presently digitized volumes of the Register. . . but that “Throckmorton” appears only 46 times and “Aycock” only twice.   

Or other items of local historical interest.  “Carousel” appears 477 times, while “ruby slippers” is nowhere to be found.  “Boxer,” intended as a search for the HMS Boxer, antagonist in the storied 1813 sea fight with the USS Enterprise that could be witnessed from Squirrel Island, appears 172 times, while “Camperdown,” a more widely celebrated engagement of the British Navy is invisible locally. 

The list contains not only a hyperlink to each occurrence of the searched-for term but also a portion of the passage in which the term appears, allowing you to select among the many Pinkhams (Howard, Henry, Capt., Isaac, etc.) or Boxers (Sch., Boxer, Wiscasset; Col. Boxer; savage Boxer dog; etc.) those of particular interest to you.  Moreover, the list can be downloaded, as can a single page or article of interest.  

For 150 years, the Register has been chronicling the vital daily stories of this peninsula’s members with the same immediacy and close attention to detail that it does today, holding up a mirror to them and to this place where they were fortunate enough to live.  We invite you to peruse this rich, sprawling tapestry depicting the way we were.