Week Seventeen at The Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum

This week was very busy at MCLM. We are running in high gear preparing for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. MCLM will be installing an exhibit at the Culver City Senior Center, the theme for the event is Have We Achieved the Dream? The exhibit space will consist of cases, tables, easels and a monitor. 

Other than exhibition design I have been processing a collection of songbooks, sheet music, church bulletins, and clippings.  I am truly in the beginning staging of processing; simply separating the items into their respective groupings.  After the collection has been lightly processed volunteers can inventory the collection and then the inventory can be pushed into our catalog. 

Weeks 17-18 at the Alabama Department of Archives and History

Greetings from Montgomery!

The past two weeks have been more of the same here at the Alabama Department of Archives and History. Last week was inventory week, so we were closed to the public for that week. In addition to participating with the organizational wide inventory project, I also continued to inventory the Charles Morgan collection, finish my public program, and scan photographs.


That's all for now.

Until next time
Cheylon Woods
IMLS Fellow
Alabama Department of Archives and History

Week Eighteen at the Maryland State Archives

I’ve been doing background research on manumitted slaves and colonists who emigrated to Liberia. In the early years of the colony, there was the sad case of a colonist, Eben Parker, who had a contentious relationship with members of the indigenous population. He was in an altercation over goods which lead to his murder and the death of several Liberians. Although for the most part, the colony maintained an uneasy peace with native Liberians, there was often the fear that tensions would erupt into violence.

My supervisor came across a runaway ad for 26 slaves who escaped from Dorchester County in 1857. Although we have case studies for the fugitives, we don’t have any for the slave owners so I’ll be working on writing those.

I’ve been working on guidelines for our social media use and planning our Facebook page to launch next month on Frederick Douglass’ birthday. I just finished record-stripping my section of the Dorchester 1870 U.S. census. After team members take turns approving each other’s records, we’ll be able to push the records over the firewall and make them available to the public.  Have a great week!

Krystal

January 3rd - 6th, 2012

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!

Hello all!! I hope you are enjoying the new year and taking full advantage of opportunities it has offered thus far. I feel this year will be a great year!! 

So, this week I began the largest portion of the project, Section II: S.L. Smith. This section consist of 30 boxes, unprocessed. I predict around 50 boxes processed. I have began by separating everything into decades (1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s) and then will break things down future from that point on. I estimate this will take me about a month and half to do so. One problem I have encountered is that S.L. Smith's date of death has not been listed in any of the documents thus far. When he retired as Peabody's Provost in 1947, he was 72 years old. This is a lengthy life for the 1940s. Online research is a bust when it comes to finding a details biography on him. I have done my own research in the very beginning, creating a timeline of his life and no death date turned up then. In addition, nothing has turned up in my 1960s pile, yet. I assume he passed away in the 1950s. I will continue digging...it may require some phone calls and a trip over to Peabody. I will update you as the process come along. Again, Happy New Year and blessing!!

Aisha Johnson

Week Fourteen-Sixteen at Avery Research Center

Hello everyone, here at the Avery Research Center we had a couple of weeks off for the holiday season, but before the break I was busy helping Ms. Wright to create content for the Avery Messenger and inventorying the NAACP collection.

For the break, I had the opportunity to stay with a friend, Ms. Ramona La Roche (she is the author of Georgetown County, which is a book in the Arcadia Publishing’s Black in America Series), who has a home near Georgetown, SC. Her family still lives on the Arcadia Plantation in the area because they have an agreement with the landowners that allow the generations of the enslaved to still live on the property. I was amazed to learn about this type of living still occurring. I also had the opportunity to meet Ms. Minnie, Ms. La Roche’s friend who is a 94 years young (well 95, she turned 95 on Christmas) woman, who had very exciting things to tell me. Ms. Minnie grew up on the Hobcaw Barony in South Carolina and she told me stories of going to school, how she basically made the master of the Barony pay for her schooling, the treatment of the people on the plantation, her experiences as a teacher both in New York City and in South Carolina, and other interesting tidbits. She told us that Baronies were used by Northerners as hunting lodges and that the animals that the men killed were given to the African Americans. At 94 years young she was very engaging and energetic (ex. She swung on a rope swing and walks everywhere).  I want to be like her when I get to that age. We also toured Mansfield Plantation, where there are slave dwellings and a church used by enslaved people still standing. The church was renovated, but the dwellings still need care. 

Read more here. 

Aaisha Haykal
IMLS Fellow
Avery Research Center

Week Sixteen at The Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum

MCLM was proud to host the closing event for L.A. Rebellion Creating  a New Black Cinema   The event was spectacular! MCLM rolled out the red carpet (literally) for its guests. Some notable attendees were John  Singleton, Julie Dash and Roger Guenveur Smith.  There was also a special presentation by Ben Caldwell, an independent film maker. 

I continued to process scrapbooks and posters. Now that we have physical control of the collections department is moving onto cataloging the items.  The cataloging process for each item is different; some items will have LOC numbers while others will not. Because each item is different a detailed workflow is necessary for each type of item. I have thus far created the the workflow for sheet music and posters. 

Weeks Sixteen and Seventeen at the Maryland State Archives

The last two weeks were pretty quiet. I spent most of my time record stripping manumissions lists and the 1870 U.S. census for Dorchester County for our database. I’m also trying to identify where in the Maryland State Colonization Society papers there may be more information about specific colonists. I’ve begun looking through the society’s newspaper, The Maryland Colonization Journal, which frequently printed colonists’ letters but they tend to reek of boosterism.

I also enjoyed working on a crowd-sourced proposal to SAA for a new members’ roundtable. The blog and link to the proposal are here. The proposal is on the SAA Council’s agenda for this month, so hopefully it will be approved!

Krystal