The Wiregrass Common Heritage Project Digitizing the Hidden History of a Community In 2016, the History Department and Wiregrass Archives at Troy University Dothan Campus received a $12,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ COMMON HERITAGE PROJECT FUND

This grant required no matching funds and was not the application or paperwork burden we normally associate with NEH grants. IN fact, it is designed to help small local organizations uncover their communities’ hidden history – those little private collections of documents and photographs held by private citizens who don’t think of their own materials as historically important. The grant allowed us to conduct two “warm-up” workshops, buy enough equipment to conduct two “Community Scanning Days,” and engage the community and its hidden historical collections.

Partners Landmark Park, Dothan The History Department and Wiregrass Archives at Troy’s Dothan Campus partnered not only with the National Endowment for the Humanities but also with the Dothan-Houston County Library System and Landmark Park (a living-history installation on a campus just north of Dothan since the mid 1970s) Partners

Events African American Genealogical Research in Alabama Workshop, May 21 Preserving Your Family Archives Workshop, June 4 Community Scanning Day, June 18 Community Scanning Day, June 25 Summary Meeting, December 5 We set up five events, listed here: May 21: Workshop on African American Genealogy in Alabama with Frazine Taylor (Chair, Black Heritage Council of Alabama, author of Researching African American Genealogy in Alabama, New South Books, 2008) June 4: Workshop on Preserving Family Archives with Dana Chandler (Tuskegee University Archivist) June 18: Community Scanning Day at Dothan-Houston County Library June 25: Community Scanning Day at Landmark Park in Dothan December 5: Conclusion and Summary meeting, open to the public, Dothan-Houston County Library

African American Genealogy Workshop, May 21 Frazine Taylor spent her career as the African American genealogical research coordinator at the Alabama Department of Archives and History. She is the author of Researching African American Genealogy in Alabama: A Resource Guide published by NewSouth Press in 2008. She is also the chair of the Black Heritage Council of Alabama, a subsidiary of the Alabama Historical Commission. So she is well-qualified to conduct this workshop. Ms. Taylor covered three topics: Resources in Overcoming the Challenges of African-American Genealogical Research Researching Convicts Records Researching Death Records, tombstones, and family lore

We enjoyed a full and attentive house for this 5-hour workshop.

Preserving Your Family Archives Workshop, June 4 Dana Chandler, archivist at Tuskegee University and trained in the Auburn archival program, conducted a workshop for family historians about preserving their documents, photographs, and artifacts.

The first half of his workshop covered the basics of physical preservation, arrangement, and description. The second half was a hands-on tutorial in which he worked with those who had brought a smattering of their collections. He demonstrated specific techniques for handling and identifying items for both preservation and inventorying. He also provided participants with preservation sleeves, folders, and an acid-free (Hollinger) box.

Community Scanning Days, June 18 and 25 As I said, the NEH grant allowed the wiregrass Common Heritage Project to purchase equipment. IN fact, we purchased FIVE (Epson Perfection V600) SCANNERS and TEN (Lenovo) LAPTOPS that allowed us to establish five scanning stations. One laptop technician operated the scanner while the other recorded indexing information (metadata) from the community member about each item being scanned.

In addition to scanning photographs and documents and taking indexing information, we provided copies of the scans to the participant on a thumbdrive. We also provided protective enclosures – photograph envelopes and acid-free file folders – for each of the items we scanned. It was not a requirement in order to have “stuff” scanned, but we hoped participants would donate the scans to the Wiregrass Archives.

Collections Joy Kelley Collection, RG 210 Willadean Hall Collection, RG 211 Mary C. Eddins Collection, RG 212 Raymond Riley Eddins Collection, RG 213 Martha Carlile Collection, RG 214 Queen Amos Collection, RG 215 All SIX participants did. This resulted in the creation of SIX new Collections / Record Groups in the Wiregrass Archives. All told, we scanned a total of 135 photographs and family documents, 154 African American funeral programs, and a 1967 high school yearbook.

The Wiregrass Archives promised each donor that we’d post their scans to our website as an online guide to their collection. This is a composite of Joy Kelley’s online collection guide, showing the metadata we collected about the collection itself as well as the identification information for each image. Clicking on any image in the Calendar renders a larger version at 96 dpi. This is accessible from the Wiregrass Archives website, under Online Finding Aids.

Alabama Mosaic The Wiregrass Archives also uploaded the scans to the online union list of digital collections in Alabama, “Alabama Mosaic.” Alabama Mosaic is maintained by the Alabama Department of Archives and History and the Auburn University Library IT unit. It employs the ContentDM software, and everyone with digital images in the state is welcome to contribute. This is the Joy Kelley Collection page. Clicking on any image opens more information. For example, if we selected the full color image at the bottom of this display . . .

Alabama Mosaic Item Description . . . we receive THIS page – a larger image and all the item-level metadata keyed in by Wiregrass Archives staff. None of the donors knew anything about Alabama Mosaic, and most of them barely understood about the online finding aids until we project leaders made a wrap-up presentation in December 2016. But once they understood, they immediately considered their donations well-made.

What’s Next? It is the intentions of the project leaders to continue to uncover hidden community history by hosting more scanning days and by making it possible for local organizations to conduct in-house scanning. We hope such entities will donate copies of the scans to the Wiregrass Archives so this hidden history will be less obscure. The NEH Common Heritage Grants are designed for ease of administration and work well for community groups that want to build capacity while capturing their local hidden history. I hope you’ll consider applying for one of these.