The Flagler Beach City Commission on Thursday is set to be the first city to declare April “Sisco Deen Month” in perpetuity, in honor of the archivist and long-time member of the Flagler County Historical Society, who died last August at 83. Deen was a Flagler Beach resident.
The Historical Society’s Ed Siarkowicz submitted the request for a proclamation, which the society hopes will also be adopted by Bunnel, Palm Coast and the County Commission. (See: “At Sisco Deen’s Memorial, Tales of When Jail Saved Him from Dissolution and a Jeep Shook Him Overboard.”)
“Sisco has left us so many gifts,” said Al Hadeed, the county attorney and, like Deen, an amateur historian who frequently addressed the society and worked with Deen. “Their bounty will power our preservation efforts and bring our public closer to the stories and traditions that give life to this land. He will be in the text and the footnotes of our history for generations to come.”
The proclamation recognizes Deen’s herculean documentation of “the immigration, emigration, and genealogies of over 320,000 individuals that have ties to Flagler County and its unincorporated areas and Municipalities,” work he recorded on a website he created and maintained starting long before the age of blogging and bloggers.
Deen, a native Floridian, received the Marinus Latour Presidential Citation for dedicated support of the Florida Historical Society in 2020. He was Flagler County’s Veteran of the Year in 2017 (he had two long stints in the Air Force and served in the Florida Army National Guard, the Army Reserves, the Air Force Reserves.
The 2024 Annual Meeting of the historical society “was noticeably shy one long term member,” the March issue of the society’s newsletter notes, referring to Deen’s absence. “Abeautiful tribute was given by Sisco’s wife Gloria McArn-Deen as well as by Sisco’s sister Claudia Deen-Malo. Each of the accomplished historians spoke about Sisco’s natural affinity for collecting artifacts and documents and of the extensive genealogical research he had accrued over the course of his lifetime.” Gloria lives in the couple’s home in Flagler Beach, within misting distance of the surf past A1A.
The Flagler County Historical Society has also launched a $2,000 scholarship in Deen’s name, to be awarded to a Flagler County student who is studying History. Applicants must be a U.S. Citizen, a resident of Flagler County, qualify for acceptance to a college or be currently enrolled in a college. The deadline is May 15. The application is available here or below.
“I’m feeling like the scholarship recognizes students who are unrelenting in their pursuit of truthful record of events and curious about the threads which weave the fabric of our present day perspectives and points of view,” Deen’s son Devin Deen said. He recalled one of Sisco’s visits to New Zealand, where Devin lives–Sisco and Gloria were wide travelers–when the Deens went to the largest cemetery in Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand, to track down the headstone of a relative from Florida and Georgia who immigrated to New Zealand in the early 1900s.
It was a characteristic Deen outing. Devin had brought his children. They hunted for the headstone and found it, and Sisco, in Devin’s recollection in an email, “told his grandchildren “the story of this person to my kids so they could appreciate the significance and understand how this person who came to NZ a hundred years before they were born now has more relatives in the present (them) who have commenced their own antipodean adventure in the present. And that’s what history is about–connecting the accurate past with the present so that we make decisions about our path which guide us into the best future we can create for those who will survive us.”
Flagler-County-Historical-Society-Scholaship-Application-2024-final-copy-pdf
