Continuing on with our large genealogy research collection, we are now on Stage 3. We've triaged all the boxes into various topics as mentioned in my last blog post.Yesterday we had a good look at the newspaper clippings. It's overwhelming. The image on the left shows some, but not all of the binders and boxes of clippings! There is another large plastic tub full of loose clippings.
Many are in binders but a very large number are loose and in plastic sleeves in boxes.
I pulled out one of the binders and took a photo to illustrate how they were originally organized . It is obvious by looking through the binders that she organized the clippings by surname, then glued the clippings to blank paper, attempting to keep family groups together. This is a wonderful resource of births, marriages, deaths, obituaries, graduations and so on. However there are hundreds, if not thousands, of loose clippings that are not sorted so we will have to think about how best to treat those.
The newer clippings may be available online so we have to decide if it is worth house space to devote to them. I did note some clippings from the early 1900s and late 1800s, and those may be worth preserving. We have some tough decisions ahead.
We found room in the basement for the binders of newspaper clippings which were labelled A through to Z , although we are missing some of the alphabet! I suspect those are some of the loose clippings as we know that the Heritage Assocation began removing clippings from the binders in order to inventory them before realizing the collection was too large for them to handle.
We have saved binders to replace the missing letters and hopefully in the future we will be able to at least organize the loose clippings to insert in binders. But we won't use glue!
Of course the question still remains - what do we do with the clippings once organized? We're mulling on that question.
Our genealogy group has a large collection of folders with similar contents collected over a period of more than 20 years. Last year we started an indexing project in order to make these materials accessible. I ran a training session and provided templates in Excel, Word and LibreOffice. Volunteers, currently about 5, take home a folder and enter the data which is then forwarded to me to be combined into the overall index. There is no time limit set for completion of this project as we are all volunteers.
ReplyDeleteA limited version of this index is provided on our public website with a link to a research request form. The complete index is provided on our internal website for members of our group. At this stage more than 3000 items have been indexed. Further details here https://www.carmelgalvin.info/2019/05/a-pathway-to-indexing.html
What fun! What an ordeal to work with. That is the sort of thing I like to do but each clipping would take me down the rabbit hole of no return. You need a lot of help to get this done in your lifetime.
ReplyDeleteFabulous collection. To think these have survived & future generations will be able to obtain valuable family history information. Best wishes on your noble endeavour!
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