Use the comment section here to talk about what you’ve found so far, or to pose questions about your sources, or just to share what you’re working on.
Use the comment section here to talk about what you’ve found so far, or to pose questions about your sources, or just to share what you’re working on.
Hello, I’ve spent a bit of time sifting through Eastern’s archives and have found very little. Sadly the university lost much of its earliest archived materials to a fire many years ago. Thankfully there are still a few surviving catalogues from the era. I will be looking through those and tracking down names of students in local newspapers. Later in the semester I plan on heading down to the Hartford library to get more information. In spite of this setback I anticipate finding something that will lead me to what I’m looking for.
So far, the research here in Fredericksburg has been going fairly well. Luckily both the University of Mary Washington and the city itself are heavily rich in history, and that history is pretty well documented and recorded thanks to the history enthusiasts in the area. I am lucky enough to have the opportunity to work with several other students at my university, and together we have found that our school did a remarkable job of preserving yearbooks and course catalogs from the past, including the era surrounding World War I. Though Fredericksburg is known for its role in the Civil War, there are several organizations throughout the city that have collections pertaining to the home front during the First World War. We are optimistic about the materials we will find, we just hope we’ll be able to make trips to such locales during their odd hours of operation!
Luckily, Georgia College & State University is home to a wealth of resources that carefully document her history since the college’s inception. I am in my fourth year here in beautiful Milledgeville, Georgia and have been quite fortunate to have gained some previous experience in local history and archival research in my undergraduate career. I have done a preliminary inventory of the sources available to me in our university’s special collections and was very delighted to find yearbooks, rule books, school newspapers, local newspapers and letters from the president, along with a myriad of helpful archival records. Georgia College has carefully preserved the manuscripts of past historians, along with diaries and letters belonging to prominent figures in Milledgeville history. I am quite sure that with the help of these resources, I will be able to create a colorful and accurate profile of Georgia College (which was, at the time, of course, called Georgia Normal & Industrial College – a women’s college) during the Great War. I will be researching for the Century America project as well as a university-wide initiative to use our school’s history to create campus-wide unity and school pride, a project for which I am serving as the chair. I look forward to diving deeper into the rich history that Georgia Normal & Industrial College offered at the time of WWI.
Essentially my blog has died. So I will do my initial research update here. I am in contact with the head of archives at Shepherd University and they have not yet given me much information on the resources available. I would assume that the school newspaper, which was around at the time, has been archived and could be useful. But as we have only been here a week the extent to the material has not fully been explored. I also got in contact with the local historical society in attempt to see what material they had on the time period. The head of the society said that the archives were too messy to handle and I wouldn’t find anything. However I hear from people who have worked with the historical society in the past that the head of archives there can work the collection very easily and I should try and get in contact with them directly. Furthermore I have discovered a plaque on campus of all the men from Shepherd who died in the war, which I should be able to use my ancestry.com account to find out more about them. I also believe I am going to use information on Storer College I found on their contribution in World War I. This was an all African American college located in near by Harpers Ferry and is important to the story as Shepherd was segregated at the time.