Week Thirty at the Maryland State Archives

Last week, I spoke to an 8th grade social studies class about importance of archives and what we do at the Study of the Legacy of Slavery. They had just completed projects for History Day and so were somewhat familiar with primary sources and archival institutions. Since they were about to start a unit on the Civil War, my presentation served as a nice introduction to some of the themes that they would be learning about. I had a lot of fun speaking to them and was impressed by their dissection of the documents that we examined and their questions about recordkeeping and African American history.

The State of Maryland will soon be transitioning to Google Apps, and I am on the early adopters team at the Archives. I’ll get a couple of weeks head start on using Google Apps, so that I can answer questions from others in my department and help them when it’s time for them to make the transition. It’s quite fascinating to see how much cloud-based applications have become standard in such a short time.

I also continued researching Liberian emigrants from Maryland. I’m very dependent upon the Liberian censuses for information about settlers in the years after they emigrated. It’s quite interesting to look at the differences between Liberian and U.S. census records. It does not appear that maintaining robust vital and census records was a priority for the young colony. This presents quite a challenge when tracing people, particularly women, throughout their lives.

‘Til next week,

Krystal