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Inheriting a Collection: An Interview with Cape Girardeau County Archive Center Director, Marybeth Niederkorn

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It’s one thing to take care of a collection that you’ve built or cared for from the beginning, but coming into a long-established collection can be overwhelming. Where do you even start assessing what could be thousands of documents spanning multiple topics? How do you determine what is top priority for preservation and digitization efforts and what needs to wait? How do you improve and expand the functionality of a collection that’s been in use for decades?

These are the kinds of questions Marybeth Niederkorn asked herself when she was hired as the new director of the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center. Located in Jackson, MO, the Archive Center opened in 2001 to serve as a secure and accessible storage center for county records. The climate-controlled repository is open to the public and county officials five days a week with full-time staff available to help search the estimated one million pages of documents dating back to the 1790s.

Anderson Archival recently sat down with Director Marybeth Niederkorn to discuss the challenges of coming into an established collection, what the collection offers, and what she plans to do to move the collection forward.

Anderson Archival: Can you give me a little background about yourself?

Marybeth Niederkorn: I come from a background in journalism and education, which gives me a lot of training in research and a big network [of contacts in the area]. Local history fascinates me. It always has. And now, I’m able to promote it full time while also working to preserve it, make it accessible, and just deepen the understanding and the reach.

AA: So you know the Archive Center from a user’s end, and have experience with the intricacies of this region.

MN: Right, and in this region, we are really blessed with a lot of extremely knowledgeable historians. We have a bunch of organizations that have not just directors but volunteers who are deeply informed about this region’s history and … who are able to help connect the dots for people who need to know more about either their family’s history or a business’s history or how this all fits into the overall story of how this part of the country was settled.

AA: What kind of records do you house and what function does the Archive Center serve?

MN: The Archive Center is primarily a county facility, so we house county records from the treasurer, from the collector, from the auditor, so we have things like probate records, personal property tax records, marriage licenses, county commission meeting minutes, and some school records. Some of the school records we have are from schools that are no longer incorporated, so they’re very important historically.

We also have the Cape Girardeau County Genealogical Society records here. There was a genealogist named Margaret Mates who did research on hundreds of families in the area, and she has collected information on birth and marriage records. It’s an extensive collection of binders of her work, and that’s extremely helpful when someone calls us and says, “Hey, I’m trying to figure out, my twice-great-grandfather was married three times and how does that family work?” We’re able to give them some insight usually using those records, and we can also usually pull up information on . . . maps of land ownership.

There’s a map [of the county] that we use a lot. It’s the 1901 map, and it shows who owned what and where, and we have that indexed so we can usually find some pretty good information. We can either work backwards from it using our tax records—ownership records—or, we can work forward.

And we assist patrons with research. We talk with genealogists from all over the world. We have a genealogist in Germany who has some family connection here, so he calls us sometimes. We work with people who are looking for records of all types. A pretty common one we get is someone calling in to find out when their divorce was finalized, because they are getting remarried or they need a driver’s license. It’s kind of eclectic. We never have the same day twice.

We never have the same day twice.”—Marybeth Niederkorn, Director of the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center

AA: What was it like coming into an established collection for the first time?

MN: A little overwhelming. From my time at the Southeast Missourian I knew about this facility… I had an idea of what I was getting into, but it has been a long process of wading into the collection so that I don’t drown. I’ve been leaning pretty heavily on our volunteers and on Lyle Johnston, our assistant archivist, who is a wealth of information and can put his hand on just about any document in the place when asked.

I have a wonderful staff and I am trying not to overwhelm myself. Fortunately, my predecessors, the previous directors of this facility, have been excellent stewards and custodians of this collection. I was able to step into something that was pretty well prepared for someone to take over and take it to the next level.

AA: What does the next level look like for this collection?

MN: We already have a gem of a facility. My hope is to raise the profile of this place and have more people understand what we have, what we are, and what we can do for them. We are a county facility. We’re supported by county tax dollars. I take that very seriously.

[The collection is] publicly accessible, and I would love for more of the public to know about us, and that we can do a lot of research [on their behalf] by phone or email.

We had a person this morning email us and ask what the history of a particular building in Cape Girardeau is. Our first questions back were, “What do you want to know specifically? Do you want to know chain of ownership? Do you want to know historical significance, because that’s a big question, but we’d love to help.”

We love a mystery, is what I like to tell people, because I think people hesitate to ask us to do research for them because they feel like it’s a big ask, but we love diving in and seeing what we can find for people. That is pretty much our favorite thing to do here.

The Archive Center holds much of Cape Girardeau County’s history

AA: What were some of the first things you had to assess?

MN: Lyle had been the de facto director for not quite a year before I came in because the previous director had been very ill and unfortunately passed away this spring. So, I’m still in the discovery phase; I’m still trying to assess where we are.

The first thing that we talked about on day one when Lyle took me on a tour of the facility was that we need to increase our shelving capacity, because there are some places where boxes are stacked two or three tall on a shelf. That’s not ideal, because paper is really heavy, and these boxes are not really designed for that level of structural integrity. That’s our biggest focus right now. As soon as we get that secured, we can start looking at what kinds of records we can digitize in order to support our physical collection.

We get that question a lot, “Why isn’t your whole collection online?” Oh, boy.

It would be really nice, but we have other priorities at the moment. We would love to have things online, but there’s also some sensitive information. We house divorce records—divorce records have social security numbers and children’s names and that kind of thing.

AA: In other words, with digitization comes cyber security.

MN: Exactly. And that would be something we would need to outsource. What I tell people is, if we had 500 volunteers working 50 hours a week, it might only take us 60 years to get most of our collection online, you know, so it’s a lot. And we don’t even have 50 volunteers.

AA: How do you prioritize changes and improvements for the archive?

MN: It’s a matter of figuring out what is going to be the most costly. As far as money and time, I’m working on grants to help secure that funding. I am working on what I consider the biggest things first, and also maintaining our document stabilization efforts.

I would really like for an outside observer to come in and assess what we’re doing right and let us know what we can improve, because I think having an outside perspective would be very helpful.

I don’t want to just go back there willy-nilly and say, “Well, I know we need shelves but I don’t know what else we need,” and just kind of throw darts at a list of stuff, if you know what I mean. Having a plan is definitely better.

AA: What other plans do you have for the archive?

MN: I’m hoping to raise the profile and public awareness of what we have, and hopefully work towards digitization as a backup to our existing hard copies. I have been talking with a lot of the other facility directors and organizations in the area. I’m hoping to work as closely as I can with, for instance, the State Historical Society of Missouri, with the Genealogical Society of Cape Girardeau County, with the Cape Girardeau County History Center, which is about a block and a half away from us, and with Southeast Missouri State University, in Cape Girardeau.

They focus more on collections that have physical objects, so their mission is a bit different from what we do, but it’s a great opportunity for us all to support each other and work together. We all have different resources and different strengths, and if a person calls us, and they need some information that I happen to know the State Historical Society is working through at this very moment, then I can direct them that way and vice versa.

My hope is to work more closely with other organizations, and generally be more visible and more accessible to people so that we can be of the most benefit possible.

People hesitate to ask us to do research for them because they feel like it’s a big ask, but we love diving in and seeing what we can find for people. That is pretty much our favorite thing to do here.”—Marybeth Niederkorn, Director of the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center

AA: What would you suggest someone coming into an established collection should do?

MN: Don’t try to do everything at once. Don’t try to learn everything at once, it’s going to take some time. Knowing the physical location of things is important, and knowing the condition of the records in your collection is important.

Knowing who your resource people are is important. For instance, we have a few key people we can call if we have a question. We got a question last week where someone was looking for the name of a specific funeral home that had operated in the 1940s and 50s. We looked in our phone directories; we looked in obituaries from that time period. We looked a few places and could not come up with it.

It’s very possible that a funeral home in the 1940s /1950s didn’t have a phone number, so it wasn’t in a phone directory. But I was able to call a couple of people, and one of them came right back with, “Oh, this was the name of it. All of their records went to a specific place whenever they closed down.” So, knowing your key people to call to help fill in the gaps and put information together is very important.

Knowing the state the collection is in and understanding what the mission of your facility is—know your goals and understand how to get there is essential. And that’s probably going to take a lot of talking to people and sitting with the collection and getting a good physical sense for it.

 

Anderson Archival is grateful to Marybeth Niederkorn for her time and participation in this interview. The Cape Girardeau Archive Center can be reached at archive@capecounty.us. For many researchers and archivists, knowing the resources that are publicly available, such as the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center, is the first step in unraveling the ever-growing story of history.

If you’re coming into a collection or have been curating one from scratch and it needs digitization, the experts at Anderson Archival are ready to help you move your collection forward.

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Digitizing the Oldest Black Newspaper in America—One Photograph at a Time

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When John H. Murphy founded The Afro-American newspaper in 1892, his goal was to combine three separate church publications into a single-page newsletter. Murphy was both a former slave and a Civil War veteran, and in the Reconstruction era, The Afro-American served to inform and unite his Maryland community. Little did he know, it would become America’s oldest running black newspaper. By Murphy’s death in 1922, the newspaper had grown to cover most of the Atlantic coast and expanded to thirteen regional editions.

At its heart, The Afro-American (now simply Afro-American, or colloquially, Afro) was a mouthpiece for black America. It documented everyday life in black neighborhoods that the mainstream white media didn’t cover. Wedding and funeral announcements, neighborhood restoration projects, feats of black artists and athletes, and local community events could all be found in an issue of the Afro-American. The editorial section argued against Jim Crow machinations, discussed black labor rights, and highlighted education advocacy. The newspaper also gave a voice to aspiring black journalists, like Murphy’s own daughter Elizabeth Murphy Phillips Moss, who became America’s first black female reporter.

Murphy’s children continued the Afro-American’s important work. Fourth generation relatives John J. Oliver, Jr. and Frances M. Draper manage the paper today. It’s been a cornerstone in representing black journalistic voices in their own words and social groups. Media of the time tended to focus only on exceptional members of the black communities. Unless a black person was a celebrity of national renown, they were unlikely to catch the attention of mainstream news publications. The Afro-American was a way for a black child in Baltimore to pick up a newspaper and see stories of citizens and communities that looked like them.

There was a whole culture, a whole way of life that was ignored by American society. It didn’t exist but in the black press.”—Asantewa Boakyewa, an administrator in the Center for Africana Studies, Unboxing History

Preserving Everyday History: A Daunting Task

An institution as large and old as the Afro-American is bound to have a lot of source material stored, but the reality is almost beyond imagination. In 1923 the newspaper’s staff began actively storing every document, photograph, and letter used in the publication.

One approach to digital preservation is to focus solely on material with the highest research and revenue value. This would, in theory, limit the scope of the project to photographs of famous newsmakers and the articles with the most recognizable headlines.

However, such an approach would fly in the face of the Afro-American’s mission. From its inception, the newspaper held the lives and experiences of everyday citizens in high importance. A digital representation of the Afro-American wouldn’t be complete without advertisements, local births and deaths, letters from around town, and images of black people who aren’t already found in the historical canon. Everything was important to the Afro-American, and everything would need to be digitally preserved in order to keep the paper’s rounded picture of its time and community.

Nearly seventy years of bound broadsheets live in the Afro-American’s archives, which takes up seven rooms of the newspaper’s headquarters. Four of those rooms boast floor-to-ceiling shelves of hundreds of archival boxes, containing over 150,000 labeled envelopes stuffed with artifacts. File cabinets encase folders of photographs, each carefully annotated on onion skin pasted to the back of each photo. With no way to find a needed source easily, indexing would require digitization.

Digitizing a collection of this size and composition would prove the Afro-American’s biggest challenge.

Materials that old and delicate (like the onion skin annotations) need to be handled carefully, and the variety of media types meant that care and cost would be required in the effort. Manual digitization wouldn’t be as simple as feeding documents through a scanner. Sorting, categorizing, and deciding on metadata factors for the digital end product requires intense planning—something that’s much harder to do when a collection fills seven entire rooms.

Into The Future

Enter Thomas Smith, a graduate student and young programmer, and his invention, Project Gado. In 2010, Smith worked with the Afro-American to win grant funding for digitization, but even with money, the effort faced a daunting task.

The archives of the Afro-American contained 1.5 million historical photos. When approaching the project, Smith took stock of the collection. In his Medium article about the project, Smith writes, “The standard approach to scanning a commercial archive is to focus on the most valuable 1% to 2% of the collection. Almost invariably, this means capturing images that cover famous people and major events. The everyday, being less profitable, is left out.”

Smith’s vision? Use brand new technology to digitize everything.

He built Project Gado, a scanning robot which, by Smith’s estimation, would shrink scanning time and man hours. Gado works through Python and Arduino coding languages and operates by lightly suctioning photographs and placing them, one by one, on a scanner. Supervised by a human, the robot was able to scan about 120,000 images in the first year.

Additional Challenges & Earning a Profit

A virtual folder of raw image files is just as useful for research or revenue as a folder of photographs, but it can offer superior search capabilities when set up properly. This can save significant time and resources that can be allocated to more important tasks than sifting through boxes.

In order to make the Afro-American’s newly-digitized image collection searchable and sellable, Smith and the digitization team knew they would need to employ metadata. Adding information by hand was one option, but being a technical expert, Smith wanted to try powerful AI tools. In 2010-2012, this kind of technology was still in its earliest days when applied to visual media, so Smith’s team started building what they needed from scratch.

For the text, though, a major tool was Google Vision’s OCR. This tool detects when text appears in a document and then attempts to read it. This is an impressive tool, but has significant limits that can only be mitigated by detailed, human review. Check out the results in the Afro-American Archives.

AI tools created by IBM and trained by Smith’s team were also useful in identifying themes, content, and historical figures. Where the AI fell short was around gender and age. Even in today’s AI, facial recognition is largely ineffective when presented with people of color.

All that time and effort resulted in a product that could be sold to media marketplaces, like Getty Images. Now, licensing these powerful images helps fund the Afro-American’s reporting. These tools also helped move the field of preservation forward and displays just how useful deep learning and AI can be to the future of digitization.

The Impact of Everyday History

Smith pinpoints the incredible impact digitizing everyday black history creates. “That experience—that personal moment of interacting with the past—is a unique engagement with history that the archive offers.” This connection between the modern, everyday person and their counterpart in the past only comes when attention is paid not only to famous figures, but faces in the background. “Digitizing a whole archive (or at least a massive sample of it) affords the opportunity to capture both the iconic, highly profitable images and those that document daily experience,” says Smith.

Today, this wide-spread preservation of all perspectives and identities throughout history is more feasible than even ten years ago when the efforts to digitize the Afro-American began. According to Smith, “Modern scanning tech like the… overhead camera can scan hundreds of images per hour, and sheet-feed scanners today can scan delicate materials without damaging them. For institutions that can afford the tech, there’s no excuse not to digitize everything.”

Digitization of the Afro-American’s archives is ongoing, and presentation of its contents remains in flux, but organizations seeking similar results now have an amazing success story to look to for inspiration.

History’s raw materials, like fossils, are embedded in layers of time. Consider a drawer in your office desk or a hall bureau at home: Its jumbled contents form a visual collage of your recent past. History gets written when somebody sifts through the remains and ponders how all the pieces fit together.”—Bret McCabe, Unboxing History

Our histories, our cultures, and what makes us one human community—these concepts are more than items displayed in museums or on library shelves. Our stories wouldn’t be complete without the everyday lives of the community. The Afro-American’s massive historical collection of journalistic ephemera illustrates a rich history of a side of American life that is often missing from narratives.

Seemingly-ordinary collections are often the truest pictures of history. This ideology is part of Anderson Archival’s mission, just as it powers Project Gado and lives on in the Afro-American’s archives. If you’re ready to make sure that your collection is available for future generations and even for profit-earning, reach out to us today.

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“More to Be Told”: Finding the Right Fit for Your Private Collection

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It’s finally time! You’ve decided to preserve that collection of historical family artifacts you have boxed up and collecting dust. Maybe they’re a little water-stained or faded from sitting in your basement for a decade, or possibly you’re considering offering your collection to a larger audience once digitized. No matter the size or condition, your collection is important and deserves to be preserved.

Once you’ve developed the scope of your digitization plans, it’s time to make some decisions about how to proceed. Do you tackle the project on your own with equipment you already own? Do you find an archival firm that specializes in your kind of collection? As with any hiring process, it can sometimes be difficult to find the right fit in a partner that meets both your needs as the guardian of a collection and the needs of the collection itself.

When I first came into possession of [the journals] I thought, ‘Maybe this is something I can do on my own time. Maybe I can get a scanner.’”

Collection custodian Jim Surber found himself in a tough position when planning ahead for his digitization goals. “The collection’s been in my possession for about a year now,” says Surber. “I just wanted high quality images of the covers and the contents so they could be easily shared.”

The collection consisted of twenty-one bound journals given to Surber by an extended family member. The journals belonged to Surber’s great-grandfather, contained daily diary and travel entries ranging from years 1895 to 1925, and included a number of loose newspaper clippings. The journals themselves were each about the size of a small notebook, most of them no larger than 7” x 4”. Though some of the handwriting inside had faded significantly over the years, most of the materials had inked text that remained clear even after years in storage.

Despite being nearly a century old, most of the journals were in good structural condition. “[The collection] was stored in a house as far as I know,” says Surber, “probably just a box in the basement.” Storage is an important, oft-underestimated element of document preservation and can be a huge factor when it comes to the end condition. It’s rare that a collection stored in a basement is free of water or pest damage. This collection benefitted from not being overhandled, but the tradeoff of its diligent storage is that the information in the journals had never been carefully reviewed or studied.

Finding himself with a collection that was so important to him and his family, Surber began to explore his digitization options. “When I first came into possession of [the journals] I thought, ‘Maybe this is something I can do on my own time. Maybe I can get a scanner,’” says Surber. “Then I found out, ‘Wow, this is more involved than I thought it was. This is really going to take a lot of time, a lot of dedication.’”

Many caretakers of personal collections start out in the same position. The handling and imaging of delicate pages and bindings often don’t hold up well in the small flatbed printers most people have in their home offices. An archival firm has resources like cradle scanners and imaging software that would be impossible for the DIY digitizer to afford or access.

The Surber journals in particular presented an imaging challenge; the author had used as much of the page as possible in most of his entries, and the text reached the very edge of the inner margins on many of the pages. “I’d have to press [the journals] flat on a scanner, and not all of them should be pressed flat like that,” Surber recounts. “These are fragile and I don’t want to risk hurting them.” The narrow or, in some cases, nonexistent margins required a cradle scanner and careful maneuvering to capture the entire page. For historical artifacts like these journals, using a flatbed likely would have inflicted damage and provided incomplete scans, putting a frustrated collection owner back at square one.

If a collection requires the extra care and expertise that only an archivist can provide, what’s the appropriate next step? Finding a digitization partner that values a collection as much as the guardians do isn’t always an easy task.

Interested in learning more about what a digitization partner can do for your collection? Read about Historical Document Digitization.

“I called a couple [digitization firms] before I called Anderson Archival,” Surber says, “and it wasn’t really what they did. These companies basically told me, ‘I know what you’re getting at but it’s not really what we do.’” Surber’s collection was historically significant to him and his family, but the big digitization firms he reached out to weren’t willing to invest their time and expertise. “They just blew me off,” Surber recalls. “I wasn’t able to convince them it was worth their time.” Unless your collection is a truckload full of documents that can pushed quickly through a scanner with little or no processing, many digitization firms may not work with a private collection.

One benefit of family collection projects is that the audience connection is so much more immediate. Surber says, “My digging around the family history has led me to a lot of people my branches of family hadn’t been in contact with in many years. It’s interesting to hear people’s stories and reconnect with people.” In this way, Surber and Anderson Archival approach historical collections from the same perspective. “Everybody has a different story from those days, so we’re just trying to put it all together. It’s been so long but I think there’s more to be told.” Thankfully, Anderson Archival’s digital copies of the collection can facilitate that connection.

Not all collections are understood to be historically significant to the larger public, but just because they may never be viewed in a museum or gallery or aren’t easy to feed through a high-speed scanner, does not mean that they aren’t worth preserving. Digitization of family collections is important and necessary.

If your collection means a lot to you and you’d like it to be around forever so that anyone you choose can learn from and enjoy it, digitization might be the answer. Let Anderson Archival do the hard part for you. Contact us today!

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Is the Internet Forever? (Not Always!)

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There’s a popular argument to think twice before you share on social media, because what is shared cannot be taken back.  Once online, it is online forever. While that is more of a precaution than a hard and fast rule, it is often something we believe.

But if you’ve ever read something and then tried to find it again a decade later, you know first-hand how content that is born digital can become unavailable.

The nature of born-digital content is as the name suggests—content built and published (or “born”) for a digital medium and meant to stay digital. Without conscious preservation efforts, born-digital content isn’t archived anywhere physically and can easily disappear.

Efforts by preservation organizations help mitigate the trickle or flood of material disappearing from the web, but they cannot capture everything.

What does it mean when born-digital content can simply disappear without much of a trace?

  1. Documenting Disappearances

In August of this year, a disturbing trend was revealed.

Over the course of the last ten years, a team of researchers had noticed that previously-available open access journals were disappearing from the web. In order to understand and document the full extent of this vanishing knowledge, they built methodology, compared databases, and tallied up the losses.

Information scientists Mikael Laakso, Lisa Matthias, and Najko Jahn identified a total of 176 journals that had disappeared between the years 2000-2019. These journals had been published all over the world and covered a variety of disciplines, meaning the problem was widespread and indiscriminate.

There are safeguards that act as a network of duplicate copies and preservation efforts for journals, but Thib Guicherd-Callin, acting manager of one such program, told Nature that digital preservation initiatives are “woefully underfunded.”

It is important to remember that this study wasn’t focused on how many journals had been successfully preserved and remained accessible thanks to programs such as LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), and PKP PN (Portico and the Public Knowledge Project’s Preservation Network). The Global LOCKSS Network preserves 11,000 journal titles! LOCKSS makes “use of the copies it manages, by enlisting them to validate integrity against each other, rather than relying uncritically on comparisons against a centralized fixity store,” keeping digital objects safe, accessible, and verifiable.

Matthias believes a true solution would need to be shared between publishers, authors, librarians, and preservation services, but that solution just doesn’t exist yet.

  1. Digital Excavations of the Future

Modern-day historians have a wealth of physical objects and documents (often preserved digitally) that they mine for details about events, track daily life, understand a variety of perspectives, and ultimately draw conclusions about the past. The tumultuous year of 2020 has provided an interesting thought experiment around a practical question: In one thousand years, what material from this year, created almost entirely online, will be available for study? And more to our point, what material will vanish completely?

The first question of what will be worth preserving at all is a difficult one. The answer typically only becomes clear in hindsight, but in the fast-moving world of the internet, decisions are needed now. University Affairs tracks collection projects by the University of Saskatchewan and Brock University Library, noting success in user submission and a hyper-local, person-focused scope.

Many countries, such as United Kingdom, France, and Denmark mandate their national libraries to capture a comprehensive digital record of life in that country at any given time. This may prove a future advantage to historians studying these countries’ culture in the time of COVID-19.

The United States has a more randomized approach. The Library of Congress has digital archives covering the first 12 years of Twitter, but now it acquires tweets on a selective basis “similar to [their] collections of websites.” The LOC’s Web Archive team of subject experts select sites in accordance with the Library’s (incredibly broad) policy guidance. There are also the efforts of the (non-profit) Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine project to snapshot the web.

But without a legal mandate to preserve a comprehensive digital picture of the world, gaps and perspectives are bound to be missed. When only one voice is remembered, history isn’t complete.

 

Within the field of digitization, there is often a feeling that what’s done is done forever. But in reality, website collections need to be managed and interfaces kept functional as internet standards and usage practices change. A collection easily accessed on a desktop, for example, may be impossible to navigate on a smart phone. Scans and images saved on floppy discs are now difficult to access from modern computers, and other save formats are nearly obsolete.

Anderson Archival tracks the standards and trends of digitization, ensuring that files are saved in a variety of formats that have been identified by experts as having the most digital longevity. These formats include archival PDFs (PDF-A) and are often saved on cloud servers along with physical backups. We, too, believe in the notion that lots of copies keep stuff safe.

Whether you want your collection to be accessible forever online, or want to pick and choose who is granted copies and access, Anderson Archival is the solution to your digitization needs. Don’t let your digitization decisions come back to haunt you! To start the discussion and keep your collection available for the future, contact us today.

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WWII Map Comes Home After 73 Years: Conservation and Digitization of a Soldier’s Legacy

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[Above: Anderson Archival’s digitized copy of the map displayed on a monitor with the original conserved map laid out on the table below.]

Working with historical documents means that Anderson Archival is privy to many valuable stories. The impact of these tales is often deeply personal as well as bearing a cultural impact. We recently completed work creating high resolution images to digitize an oversized World War II map. The global impact of this document is clear—one side of the map bears a narrative that tracks the movement of the 83rd Infantry Division from Normandy in June 1944 to Germany at the end of the war. The other, a detailed map, bears the signatures of the infantrymen it was gifted to, including the recent owner’s beloved father, S/Sgt Myron H. Miller.

But the personal impact doesn’t end there.

Founding Principal Amy Anderson recalls, “When I heard their story second hand, I just knew we had to write about it!” And thankfully, S/Sgt Miller’s children, Myra, Lynette, Marshall, Del, and Ken, were more than willing to share the incredible one-in-a-million tale of the map that made it back to their family “73 years later via a Frenchman.”

Anderson Archival: What do you know about your father’s involvement with the map?

The Miller Children: We know that the map was printed after the war ended as a gift to the soldiers of the 83rd Infantry Division in September 1945. It commemorated their service as a unit from Normandy, June 1944, to Zerbst, Germany, and the end of the war. With the fighting over, they had occupation duty as military police restoring order in Germany and Czechoslovakia.

Of the eleven buddies who signed the map, two joined Company K as replacements on the same day in July 1944 in Normandy—our father Myron H. Miller and James V. Cocola—and they ended the war together. Sgt. Hutchinson appears with them in a photo our dad saved. The others joined January 1945 and later. By those final days together they must have been very close.

Pfarrkirchen, Germany. Sunday, July 29, 1945. Sgt. Hutchinson and S/Sgt. Miller are on the left. Image used with permission.

AA: How did the Frenchman you reference come to be in possession of the map?

MC: Antoine Noslier, an expert on the history of the war in Brittany specializing in the 83rd Infantry Division, residing in St. Malo, France, purchased the map on eBay in 2011, about five years before meeting our family. He bought the map sight unseen because it was described to have original autographs on it.

Myra was advised to contact the expert Antoine for information as she was planning the family’s trip in 2016 to follow our dad’s footsteps through France, Belgium, and Germany. Antoine had been recommended as a reliable authority on military actions in Brittany. Myra, Ken, Del, and Marshall wanted to find the location in St. Malo (Brittany) where their father had pulled his wounded buddy out of the street after he had been hit by a sniper.

Just a few weeks prior to our arrival in St. Malo, Antoine was working on another project when he pulled out the map to check another name (James V. Cocola) that he remembered was on the map. His eyes landed on the name “S/Sgt Myron H. Miller, Dixon, Missouri” and he was amazed. He contacted Myra to confirm that our father was from Dixon, Missouri. Then he described the map he had—with our father’s signature. We were floored.

That summer, after we arrived in France and met Antoine, he took us into his kitchen—where he had the map spread out on his table. We took photos of the signature and sent them to our sister Lynette (who was not on the trip) to confirm the handwriting. She was 100% positive it was our father’s.

Then he described the map he had—with our father’s signature. We were floored.”

AA: What do you know about the process and reasoning behind returning the map to you?

MC: When Antoine showed the map to us, we were simply thrilled to see it and took many photos. We did not ask for the map from Antoine, as he had purchased it for research.

The following summer, Myra returned to St. Malo leading a Footsteps Researchers tour, and Antoine presented the map to her as a gift to the family. It was quite a gift. We are very grateful and thankful to have the map in the family.

Antoine Noslier presents the Miller children with the map. Left to Right: Myra Miller, Del Miller, Antoine Noslier, Marshall Miller, Ken Miller. Image used with permission.

AA: What plans do you have for the conserved map in the future?

MC: We have had the map professionally restored and preserved by NS Conservation in a frame that allows viewing of both sides.

We believe we have a valuable piece of World War II history and an heirloom to be displayed and treasured by the family. We will have replicas made from the digital copies to use for display at our speaking engagements and book signings with our new book Soldiers’ Stories: A Collection of WW2 Memoirs, Volume II, and with Footsteps Researchers. It is important that we stop further damage to the map and showcase our father’s signature and those of his buddies.

We also want to send a copy of the map to Antoine Noslier as a gift since he gave the original to us.

AA: What lead you to Noah Smutz/NS Conservation?

MC: Our family friend from Philadelphia, Robert “Bob” McNabb, searched the Internet for someone in St. Louis who could do a professional job. Bob’s father, James McNabb, fought with the 83rd Infantry Division, Company K, with our father, and he has a strong interest in World War II history. Bob called Noah secretly and got information, then he told me to call after he felt Noah was right for the job.

 

Smutz, in turn, directed the family to Anderson Archival for the creation of digital images. In addition to the work itself, we are grateful to Smutz, and to the children of S/Sgt Myron H. Miller, Dixon, Missouri, Company K, 331st Infantry, 83rd Infantry Division, for allowing us to be a part of this one-in-a-million story and to share it with our readers.

What family stories can Anderson Archival help you safequard? Contact us today for more information about how we can help you connect the dots and digitally preserve your family’s historical artifacts.

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Deciphering Your History: An Interview with German-English Genealogy Translator Katherine Schober

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Many people are spending more time at home these days, which means they may also be rediscovering family heirlooms and artifacts. Others may be looking into their family’s history for the first time. Brushing dust off the boxes in the attic and seeing old photo albums and letters from an ancestor’s past can spark an enthusiasm for family history that lasts a lifetime.

But simply having all the clues in front of you doesn’t mean it’s easy to piece together your family history. Genealogical research entails digging through artifacts from centuries past, and a lot can change in a century. Family members from different eras and continents had their own unique lives and traditions—which can mean your family artifacts might be written in an entirely different language than what your modern-day family speaks.

Anderson Archival sat down with German-English translator Katherine Schober of SK Translations to discuss family histories, digitization, and the joys of genealogy. Schober is a St. Louis native and graduate of Truman State University. Since 2010, she’s been translating family records, letters, and journals from German to English. Her knowledge of genealogical texts and research seemed boundless, so Anderson Archival wanted to find out what challenges family historians might have when encountering historical documents.

Schober at work.

Anderson Archival: What is it about the German language specifically that speaks to you?

SK Translations: I knew that I had ancestors from Germany, so that’s where the original interest started. Once I got to high school, I decided to study German instead of Spanish because of those ancestors. I also really love grammar and rules, and German is a very logical, grammatical language. They actually have sixteen different words for “the” depending on where the word is in a sentence!

AA: St. Louis has significant German roots. Can you speak to that as a St. Louis native?

SK: St. Louis has a lot of German immigrants who came over in the 19th century. A lot of Germans at that time said that the hills of Missouri look like the hills of Germany, so they felt like they were at home in their new state. After hearing how happy their fellow countrymen were in Missouri, other Germans then followed and ended up in St. Louis and the surrounding areas. My own ancestors (Wolken) came to St. Louis in 1854, and then a different side of the family (Mueller) came later in the 1880s. We have a lot of German history here.

AA: I’m curious how digitization plays into what you do. What’s your experience working with digitized media?

SK: Up until WWII, there was an old type of handwriting [Kurrentschrift] that was used in the German-speaking countries. It’s very intricate and detailed, with lots of small loops and flourishes. In order to be able to read it, I need to really zoom in on those letters. That’s why it’s so important to me that the document is scanned and digitized in very high quality. A lot of times I’ll get documents from clients that aren’t good resolution, and the letters become blurry when I zoom in. At that point, I’ll have to write back and say, “Please scan it in a higher resolution so that I can make out the letters.” They are usually happy to comply, because they want me to be able to decipher their letters as well!

Anderson Archival can help with high-resolution, high-quality scanning of historical documents! Read more about our process.

AA: Can you tell me more about that old German handwriting?

SK: Kurrentschrift is the same German language, the same German words, just a different style of handwriting—sort of like how Russian has a different alphabet than we do, although it’s luckily not that complicated. Some letters of the Kurrenschrift alphabet are the same as in modern German, but the majority are different. The “s” and the “e” are especially tricky. My husband, for example, is a native German speaker, and he’s able to read maybe two in five words.

Kurrentschrift was in use until after WWII, and some say that it was Hitler who said he wanted the Germans to start using the “normal” alphabet that you and I learned in school because he wanted people to be able to understand the words in the regions he conquered. He didn’t want the Germans to have one type of handwriting and everyone else to have another. When Germany lost the war, the old handwriting gradually fell out of style in the 1950s.

AA: How would you say that confidentiality plays into the work you do?

SK: I always keep documents confidential unless specifically discussed. Some clients are very open, and sometimes when I work with very interesting documents, I’ll email the client and ask, “Would you be willing to let me share this on my business social media sites for my history-enthusiast followers to see?” Some of them are excited and say, “Oh yes, that would be great, show the world and share it!” and others say, “No, I’d rather keep this private within my family.” I would never share anything without asking the client’s permission first because it does, of course, belong to them and their family. It really is a personal decision of what they feel comfortable doing.

AA: Do you think that’s a big part of choosing to research genealogy in the first place, sharing it with a larger audience?

SK: It can be. I think genealogy is a way to make everyone feel connected. Once you start doing genealogy, it can get very addicting. When you find that first great-great grandparent and realize they were a real person with a real life, you just want to keep going and finding more and more people. And it’s something that’s so exciting to share with others—especially if you find out you are distantly related to them!

Immigrants brought their languages to America, but not all of them were passed down through the generations. Image from GCaptain.com.

I recently translated a letter you may have seen on my blog from 1853. It was from a person who had just emigrated from Germany to move to America, and it was such an interesting letter because he detailed his whole experience of leaving Germany, getting on the ship, the ship journey over, landing in New York, and then getting settled in Brooklyn, NY. I was fascinated by it so I asked my client if she would be willing for me to share it. After I published it on the blog, the response from my followers was amazing, I think because people could picture their own ancestor going through the same experience and were excited to have insight into how that experience might have been.

One of the most exciting things that happened after publishing the letter was one man’s comment that really surprised me. This blog reader wrote that his own ancestor’s name was actually mentioned in the letter. His ancestor was one of the people that the author himself had gone to visit when he landed in New York!  My client and that man do not know each other at all today, but it turns out their ancestors were friends, proof of which was in the letter. I thought that was so exciting! Genealogy can really help connect people.

AA: What other kinds of documents do people bring to you?

SK: I work with a lot of church records. In the past in Germany, it was churches who kept track of people’s births, marriages, and deaths. The government didn’t keep track of these life events until the late 19th century, so anyone who’s traced their ancestry back farther than that works with church documents.

I also get to work with a lot of diaries, and those are my favorite because you really get to know a person through their personal writing. I feel so lucky that I get to read their secret thoughts 200 years later! That’s a lot of fun for me because you really feel like you’re getting to know a person and how they lived on a day to day basis. I’m a big journaler myself, and sometimes I think to myself, “Okay, I need to be careful what I write down in case anyone reads this in 200 years!”

AA: What are some challenges with the digital copies people send you?

SK: Sometimes the letter is very creased, and if there’s a big fold in the page it makes it very hard to read. Sometimes the letter is torn so half of it is missing, or there’s water damage to the letter or document. Usually, the thing that I always tell people if they are working with church records, for example, or any other type of records besides a letter or diary, is to send me as much of the document as they can. [I use] not only their ancestor’s records but the records of other people on that page, for comparison purposes. If their own ancestor’s record has water damage or a tear or a crease, then I can look to the record above or below to get a better idea of what words or phrases are missing from their own ancestor’s record.

AA: Have there been any recent projects that you’ve worked on that you’d want to speak to as far as anything that’s been particularly interesting or challenging for you?

SK: I really love the diaries. One of my favorite diaries was set during the early 1900s, written by a woman whose husband was stationed in Thailand in the army. She travelled via ship from Germany to Thailand to go be with him and she kept a diary of her ship journey. She wrote about her life on the ship, and then getting off at different ports and experiencing the culture in the different countries they stopped at. Every page, for hundreds of pages, she wrote, “I miss my husband so much,” “I can’t wait to see him”, etc. So I was really excited for her to get to Thailand and read about their long-awaited reunion. But, much to my dismay, the diary stopped right before she got to Thailand, so I never got to hear how she finally saw her husband again or how their reunion was. It was like a book with the ending torn out!

Just recently I did a letter that was written by a nine-year-old in 1822 and it was really cute. He wrote home to his father and asked him if he could stay at his friend’s house longer and if his father could send him some money because he wanted to buy presents for his friends. That was 1822, but asking if he could stay longer at a friend’s house could have been something a nine-year-old today would say today. That’s something that really strikes me, that humans have really stayed the same throughout history. The circumstances may change, but the basic emotions and feelings and relationships all stay the same.

Interested in learning more about what Anderson Archival can bring to a historical document collection? Check out our pieces on the benefits of sharing a collection online, and explaining the optical character recognition (OCR) process.

AA: What other challenges do family historians bring to you? What sort of questions do you hear?

SK: A lot of people get overwhelmed with where to start in their genealogy research. They’ve heard the family stories that their great-grandfather came from Germany, but they don’t know the town he came from or the year he came over, and the people who might have known that information have already passed away. For those people getting started, I would advise them to start with themselves, and then their parents, and then their grandparents, and document from there. A lot of people are tempted to start with the immigrant they heard came over from Germany a hundred and fifty years ago, but because so many people have the same name, or there’s a lot of towns in Germany with the same name, they might end up looking for the wrong person in the wrong town. It’s really important to document everything you know first and then build off that before you just jump in the middle and try to go from there.

AA: What key skills should someone look for when seeking a translator?

SK: The most important thing that a lot of people don’t know is that you should always look for a translator who’s translating into their native language. If you want documents translated from German to English, English should be the translator’s native language because that’s the language they’re going to be writing in and that’s the final product you’re going to get. Then if you’re wanting to go from English to German, you should find someone whose native language is German. You want that final product to be written by someone who has a good feel for writing in their native language.

 

Anderson Archival is grateful to Katherine Schober for her time and participation in this interview. If you’d like to employ her genealogy translation services, she can be contacted through her website or on her Instagram. Partnering with experts like SK Translations is just one way Anderson Archival keeps your collection’s individual needs on the forefront.

We are dedicated to preserving your history, no matter the language that history may be written in. Even the detailed OCR our archival experts perform needs the expertise of human eyes, especially when written in German.

Language doesn’t have to be a barrier when it comes to family history projects. Contact us today to learn how we can help you tackle your next genealogical challenge.

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Remembering the Suffragettes: Turning Your Online Collection Into a Narrative

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To celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote, libraries and museums are showcasing the historical artifacts of the century-long movement. Looking at these collections, it’s easy to see how the stories we learned in school can leave out some of the most interesting bits of history. That is why historical collections, no matter how niche, are important to filling the gaps that history books leave out. In this way, a digital collection becomes more than a collection of papers or photographs; it becomes a narrative of history.

Library of Congress’s Suffragette Exhibit

In a year affected by COVID-19, online access to historical collections is more important than ever. Exhibitions that would usually be offered in person have moved partially or completely online to continue educating and inspiring those who can’t visit. The Library of Congress is one of the organizations turning to the internet to celebrate the women’s suffrage movement. In addition to in-person exhibitions, they’ve created an online exhibit for people to explore.

The “Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote” online exhibit does more than simply display digital versions of the items in their collection. The Library of Congress organized the exhibition to tell a story. Rather than just present the artifacts, it narrates the different eras of the suffrage movement. Visitors can explore the early, post-Civil War women’s movement; see the picket lines in front of the White House; and learn about the brave women of color who are rarely included in history books. Though often condensed, the women’s suffrage exhibit tells a larger story of a movement that survived and changed over decades.

Beyond the main exhibition, the Library also links out into more focused collections, such as Photographs from the Record of the National Woman’s Party and Women’s Suffrage in Sheet Music, to expand on their narrative. These collections are unique, and on their own don’t tell a story. But when combined with the main exhibition’s narrative, these smaller collections add humanity to the historical figures showcased. These were impressive and creative women who lived and fought for their rights.

Telling a Story with Your Collection

One of the most important parts of a collection is the story behind it. It could be the story of gathering the materials or the story behind the artifacts, but the larger narrative is what the audience connects with. Researchers or avid enthusiasts may be able to appreciate a collection with little more than the artifacts themselves, but if your goal is to share, inform, or educate people who are new to the subject or wanting to expand their knowledge, then building a narrative is essential.

Having a strong narrative to your collection not only leads the visitor to the most important or interesting artifacts, but it puts the collection into historical context. Even journals or detailed records need context in order to enrich the history they represent. Without context, the women of color highlighted by the Library of Congress’s More to the Movement section of their women’s suffrage exhibit are just pictures and names. It’s the context of their place in the story that explains how important the women were to the suffragette movement and why they were overlooked by history.

How Digitization Can Improve Your Collection’s Storytelling

An online collection has advantages over a physical collection, one being an improved opportunity for storytelling. When a person visits an exhibit in person, they can only see what is displayed at that time. In many cases this is only one part of a larger collection. Space, condition, and security can keep amazing artifacts from in-person viewing. People must also move through a gallery and could miss items meant to be experienced together.

By digitizing, the entire collection is at the visitor’s fingertips. No need to hide away the most interesting pieces in order to protect them from deterioration. Millions of people can see these rarely shown items whenever they want, and the inclusion of these artifacts will enhance the integrity of the larger story.

Instead of wandering a physical gallery, possibly missing items due to crowds or time limitations, an online collection has the advantage of linking items together. As visitors follow these artifacts through the story behind them, they can choose to leave the path and go down a side story through direct links to other artifacts or web pages. Once done, they can easily return to the main narrative without missing anything. Since a digitized collection is available 24/7 online, visitors can come and go when it’s convenient for them.

 

People don’t always remember names or dates of historical events, but a well-told story that brings those events to life is easy to recall. Artifacts and documents enhance that story. They give proof of what happened and voice to people long past. Your collection has a unique story to tell, if you let it.

Do you have pieces of history that you’d like to see displayed as a narrative that could impact the world? Anderson Archival can help. Give us a call at 314-259-1900 or an email at info@andersonarchival.com today!

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A Gift to the Future: 3 Goals of Digital Heritage and the Archives Showcasing Them

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Why are collectors, organizations, and institutions bringing their collections into the digital age? What makes the effort and cost of digital conservation worthwhile?

As users, we can’t know the primary driving force behind the digitization of some of the most impactful collections on the internet, but at Anderson Archival, we’ve seen countless motivations for digitization. One common element is that the stewards of these collections want to bestow a gift on the digital landscape: the gift of preservation, the gift of a better future through learning and inspiration, the gift of accessibility.

New to digital libraries? Read more about digital collections and the Anderson Archival difference.

Here is a sampling of successful digital archives that showcase these three goals for digitization.

  1. Documenting and Preserving a Lost History

For some collections without a digital presence, the cultures, histories, and movements they represent may be lost in the event of a disaster. Those interested in historical preservation know that history is relevant for both today and tomorrow. Digital collections that preserve a little-known or previously lost history fill in gaps left by traditional education, inviting readers and viewers to explore and learn.

  • Early Americas Digital Archive offers rare and out-of-print texts, written in and about the early Americas as full-text documents checked against originals. This text is easy to search, read, and reference.
  • RomArchive is populated with highly curated sub-collections and journeys of thought that explore how the Roma people are represented in European history and culture, where gaps in coverage lie and affect public perception, and offer strategies for combating this skewed absence.
  • Virtual First Ohioans, a sub-collection of Ohio History Connection, invites visitors to take a tour through this native history of Ohio, starting with the archeological process involved in modern re-discovery and preservation, and journeys through time with descriptive visuals. Clicking through the section acts as a virtual museum showcasing these ancient peoples.
  • The Library of Congress’ Mapping the National Parks collection tracks the history of lands that visitors may take for granted.
  • The Digital Library of the Middle East provides a vital resource to a region often divided by conflict, preserving documents digitally because the physical originals are often sold on the black market or destroyed.

These collections and archives could have remained behind closed doors, in drawers, in museums, or even destroyed, but curators identified a need to not only preserve but to share their contents with the world.

  1. Sharing History to Change the Future for the Better

Many collection owners believe that the material in their possession has the power to educate, enlighten, and change the world for the better. In some cases, documents present underheard worldviews or religious beliefs, while others highlight periods of historical upheaval, from which many lessons may be learned. For these curators and collectors, making the words, photos, or other historical materials available to the general public is deeply important.

  • The Pearl Digital Collections of the Presbyterian Historical Society comprise the oldest denominational archives in the United States. Primary source documentation of Japanese-American internment during World War II, tied to the denomination through mission work in the camps, is just one example of a piece of history that still resonates today.
  • Another highly-curated digital museum is the digital offerings of United States Holocaust Museum. The site covers brutal historical events with honesty, providing photographic and written record for a thoughtful tour or in-depth research.
  • The Peace Database collections of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum serve a similar purpose. Though the digital archive hasn’t been updated since 2016, the site stands as memorial and marker of a horrific event.

These collections have the potential to make a profound change in the thinking of modern readers, and digitization has made them available to anyone.

  1. Giving the Gift of Accessibility

Digitization offers incredible freedom: researchers and other users no longer must travel to a single location and request limited time in a temperature-controlled room with just a copier to aid their memory. Research (and search in general) is far easier when done digitally, where a single keyword puts the user just a click away from the title, page, and paragraph they want to find.

  • The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation brings historical artifacts to users who can’t make the trip to Michigan. Their digital collections mimic walking through a museum by browsing through Expert Sets or the back room of a research library through their advanced search.
  • The New York Public Library’s Digital Collections are stunning in scope and content. Containing material that users might not have even known existed, NYPL makes these collections easy to browse and search, like this collection of The Black Experience in Children’s Books. While not every item in these collections is fully text searchable, NYPL makes discovery easy.
  • The Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan continues to grow its collection, moving forward with the belief that the content it provides is valuable and that digitization offers unparalleled search for its users.
  • The Internet Archive is possibly the longest-running and most comprehensive archive currently online. Founded on the ideal of “Universal Access to All Knowledge,” the Internet Archive has been in the news recently for linking Wikipedia-cited passages to digitized materials, stressing the importance of using digitization as a tool for verification.

Being able to access materials like these from anywhere in the world is a gift to this century. This massive amount of data is now accessible and at the fingertips of anyone in the world.

 

When all is said and done, the deciding factor to digitize may come down to the simple fact that the world is going digital. Don’t let your collection be left behind or forgotten.

Contact Anderson Archival by phone (314.259.1900), email, or our contact form today for a free consultation regarding the digitization of your collection, regardless of your goal for going digital.

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