OCEAN COUNTY – Patrick Asay and Andrew Anderson have a great appreciation for Ocean County history. The pair recently received the Special Award for Merit from the Ocean County Cultural & Heritage Commission.
Their award recognized the work they have done in creating the Facebook group Ocean County Memories est. 1850! As part of the award, Anderson of Beachwood and Asay of Toms River sat down with several Lacey Township High School students who created a short documentary called “Ocean County Memories, a Community Scrapbook” in tribute to the group and its administrators.
The online question and answer session held earlier this month can be found in its entirety at youtube.com/wltstv. The documentary was hosted and directed by student Ellie Reid.
Anderson and Asay are the administrators of the Facebook page which has more than 24,000 members at present. “I think they have done such a wonderful job for us. They showed us the past …and you see it (Ocean County) as it grew from its infancy basically,” said Robert Popovics who received the Commission’s 2020 Lifetime Achievement in the Arts award.
“They are being recognized for the knowledge, love of history and determination for creating something that benefits everyone,” Reid said in a voice over introducing the two guests.
“I realized looking over these different groups, a lot of them are there for individual towns like Toms River, Lavallette etc. but there was no group to cover all of Ocean County. I had this idea in my head that it would be nice to start a group that covered all of Ocean County because there is a lot of history out there,” Asay said.
Anderson commented that “as historians what we have access to now as opposed to a few decades ago, 50 years ago, is just tremendous. Now we can sit at home on our computer and do a tremendous amount of research about items we are finding like the dinosaur (of Bayville) or areas people have questions about.”
“It has been great with the group being able to share this. Our experiences and our collections and our history of growing up here being shared with people of the county and those of the county bringing their histories and collections here,” Anderson added.
“We wanted younger people in Ocean County to be able to find out what was it like here in the 50s, 60s or even before that. Through these stories and photographs we have had some success with that,” Assay added.
Popovics said he feels their group is like opening up a visual scrapbook of memories with images and captions and articles describing life at that time: The people, the attractions, the buildings, businesses and homes that were present.
“The idea of a community scrapbook resonated with the growing group membership. As more pictures were shared, more connections were made and the comment section propelled the group far past Asay and Anderson’s expectations,” Reid said during the interview program.
Anderson said four years ago when the group started, “there was a lot of Pat and I sharing personal photographs and it expanded to the point that by the time we reached our fourth anniversary of the page there was over 22,000 people who were members. We weren’t relying just on pictures we were posting, but now dozens of people who were regulars are posting pictures that they found through research or from their own personal family collections.”
Asay said when they started the project he thought that perhaps the page would get around 2,000 people. “I think I just caught a wave. I had no idea it would get this big. It is a passion for me. It is something I enjoy. I enjoy my family history and I enjoy reading about local history.”
“It is quite an accomplishment. There is a lot of dedication. There is a lot of sacrifice on their part to complete the job in a manner that they have done it. It is very professional. I really admire the work they’ve done and I think the entire community thanks them for what they have done,” Popovics said.
