A member of the family who developed one of the Island’s first resort-style inns ventures to tell the tale of his family’s past in his new book The Harborside Inn: A History from 1914 to 1980.

Self-published in April, the book was a way for Leo P. Convery, 90, to relive and record the work his parents and grandparents did to make the Harborside an oasis for hundreds of people each summer.

“We had a following,” he said of the inn. “My mother would put an ad in The New York Times, and the next week the phone would ring off the hook.”

The inn was started by Mr. Convery’s grandfather, Antone Prada Jr., born in 1881 in Oak Bluffs to parents who immigrated to Edgartown from the Azores. Antone’s parents had a farm on the Vineyard, and he spent his early life as a fisherman.

In 1914, Mr. Prada purchased a rooming house on South Water street, along with three other parcels between Water and Main streets. The rooming house became the Harborside Inn.

Keeping it youthful at 90. — Jeanna Shepard

Mr. Prada married Jane Hoey and the couple had one daughter, Irene Louise Prada, who later married Leo J. Convery, Mr. Convery’s father. In 1929, Irene and Leo J. took over as the Harborside’s innkeepers.

They began sprucing up the place, with his father pouring his soul into the inn, his son said, often neglecting the Vineyard summer fun.

“I didn’t appreciate the fact that he didn’t sail, he didn’t swim, he didn’t get to do the things that I did,” Mr. Convery said.

Young Leo also pitched in with the hotel work, beginning at age 10. Born in 1933, Mr. Convery grew up in Edgartown and spent his free time the way all the Island kids did — sailing, swimming, playing games on downtown streets after school and hanging out at the only drugstore with a soda fountain. Unless it was the summer. Then his life was ruled by work at the inn.

He still remembers how the family made copies of the dinner menu by hectograph, what techniques the inn’s baker used to make different French pastries and which employee was best at opening quahogs during parties.

The inn grew to more than 100 rooms across multiple Edgartown homes. In 1970, the next generation — Leo P. Convery, his sister and his brother-in-law — took over management of the Harborside as partners.

Mr. Convery’s parents died in a car crash in 1978 and two years later the inn was converted to time-shares.

In recent years, Mr. Convery started to think more about the work that had been required to keep up the inn and decided it was time to write a book about it.

“I think looking back on my folks, they just didn’t get, or I didn’t give them, enough recognition,” he said. “This is my way to do that.”

The book was also a way to recall his own journey. As a child, he said he found the Island confining and was always looking to travel to the mainland. But looking back over the better part of a century, he said he now finds Martha’s Vineyard to be “one of the finer places in the world.”

He recalled meeting his wife at the inn one summer when they both had jobs there and shared a rowboat to haul luggage from flooded first-floor rooms after a hurricane. As he grew up, the Island seemed less confining and more like a tight-knit family.

“I just thank God we’re not in a city,” Mr. Convery said. “We’ve got organizations here that support each other.”

Mr. Convery said he also ventured into real estate after developing and building a restaurant called the Navigator with his father in the early 1960s. The project was one of the most positive work experiences they had together, Mr. Convery said.

Later he developed the Down Harbor Estates subdivision in Katama, and he owns two business properties in Edgartown and Vineyard Haven. He also ran the Dockside Inn and the Oak House in Oak Bluffs, and in the early 1980s led the chamber of commerce.

He is a former Rotary Club president, he said.

Though he spends most of his time these days with his wife spotting ospreys from his sunroom or carving birds and fish in his wood workshop, Mr. Convery wanted to make sure there was a record of his family’s legacy, and that people can learn about the place where he spent so much of his life. “I look at all the people down at the Harborside, and maybe they would be interested to glean a little bit of that,” he said.

The Harborside Inn: A History from 1914 to 1980 is available to purchase in local bookstores and online through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.