Names: Alex Champion's Week 2 at the MSA

Research Archivist training continues at the Maryland State Archives.

Long time Research Department staffer Maya Davis, my neighbor Allison, and my supervisor Chris Haley reviewed MSA research systems and gave occasional exercises that further familiarized me with procedures. One exercise, which afforded my first excuse to use Ancestry.com, had me trace the census records for Leonard Foote of Calvert Co. against any municipal, county, or state government records. After some brief confusion about his name, which the census spelt “Foot,” I corroborated the identities across the various records and checked the manual birth and death indices in the stacks. Most indices at the MSA are digitized but may only be viewed on site; this pads the MSA’s visitor totals but also reduces the strain on its servers. Maya and Chris felt it was important for me to experience the manual search processes but, somewhat to their surprise, I was unable to conclude my research with in-house materials. Mr. Foote died at the ripe old age of 83 in 1970—two years past the MSA’s death records but not Ancestry.com’s.

This hunt for names reminds me of another learning curve for my placement. Once, during a meeting with a grant reviewer, Maya made a blanket statement that “all of us are from Maryland,” which gave the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland team an advantage to pick out research clues; as a new addition to the LOSIM team, I forgave her omission but she hastily apologized when I retold my origins. Sometimes my Midwestern upbringing is not an issue: A recent example arose from an e-mail sent by the commissioner of the Kunta Kinte Heritage Festival happening on September 28^th; her e-mail signature read “Lyndra Marshall (nee Pratt)”, which I assume means she has the famous Baltimore philanthropist and namesake of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in her paternal line. I knew of the Pratt because I processed the oral history interview of its then and current director, Carla Hayden, during the summer institute in Chicago. On other occasions names fail me: I examined, for several minutes, a family name written in tight script on a vital record during one exercise. I tentatively settled on “M’gomas” but my neighbor Allison eventually realized it was “McComas”—a familiar Maryland and Pennsylvania name—but even she paused before declaring it was such. An exact reading of the text presented the name as “M Comas” with neither the lowercase “c” nor an apostrophe to approximate the sound. Another irksome moment occurred when a circulating e-mail advertised a street renaming ceremony taking place at “13^th and Quackenbos.” I initially intended to go but nowhere in the text did it say this address was in Washington, D.C.; Annapolis, Baltimore, and Washington are treated almost like a single city and this implicit belief creeps into many conversations.