Community Corner

Indiana Piccirillo

Town Clerk Stacy Piccirillo's job includes a lot of digging and preserving of the town's very vital records.

Stacy Piccirillo has a degree in anthropology. While she never went on a Big Dig to find and preserve, she uses that acumen every day as East Haven’s town clerk.

Her latest Big Dig resulted in dust-laden, pencil-written receipts for goods and services from as far back as 1901. Her current preservation mission is restoring the town’s yellowed, warped vital statistics records from 1906 to 1970.

On March 8, the Town Council passed a resolution authorizing the mayor to apply for a state Historic Documents Preservation Grant to clean up and polyurethane the town’s birth, marriage and death documents. In 2010, Piccirillo got the $6,000 grant to restore old maps. She said she should find out about the new grant application in May or June.

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“We’re trying to stop the deterioration. Time takes a toll on everything,” said Piccirillo. “It’s an historic time line of our town.”

One could argue that the aging vital stats documents provide the most accurate history textbook anywhere. (Eighty-two volumes are slated for preservation.) In the 1906 book are names of streets and businesses in the context of births, marriages and deaths.

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For instance, there’s a death certificate for Eunice Ella Bradley. The 56-year-old died from a cerebral embolus. Piccirillo said Bradley Street and Bradley Avenue were likely named after Eunice’s husband’s family. The deceased’s father was Willis Chidsey as in Chidsey Street.

On Jan. 18, 1906, a Talmadge got married. Talmadge Park Healthcare Center is at 38 Talmadge Ave.

If the grant comes through, Piccirillo said Brown’s River Marotti, of Essex, Vermont, will get the preservation job as it did the maps.

Remember when manual labor cost a buck-50 a day?

About a year ago, Piccirillo said she was digging through the upper and lower vaults in her office when she came upon something unexpected: books and books of town receipts for goods and services dating back to 1901.

She blew away layers of dust – “They had inches of dust on them; it was like a movie where people go up into their attic and blow dust off their treasures” – and began digging.

These local artifacts won’t go to the cleaners. Piccirillo said she’s donating the pencil-written town receipts to the East Haven Historical Society.

Looking through these expenditures, it’s clear inflation is totally alive and quite well.

  • New Haven Water Company bill from Jan. 1, 1906, to April 1, 1906: $23.09.
  • New Haven Gas Light Company bill from Feb. 16, 2006, to March 17, 2006: $2.66.
  • Practical Horse Shoer invoice dated Oct. 2, 1906: $3.60.
  • “Italian labor” invoice of Nov. 30, 1907, for 18 days of labor at $1.50 a day: $27.
  • Edwin C. M. Hall, M.D., bill of Jan. 1, 1908, for four days of service, including placarding Mrs. Brumman’s house for diphtheria; “visit to Center School on account of unclean children”: total amount, $13.50.


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