A Treasure Trove of Family and Community History

Family, I‘ve been in genealogy heaven for a little over a month now, and I have to tell you why! (Or, at least those of you who haven’t already been cornered by me. Sorry/Thanks!)

 

ONE stack of funeral programs from the Willie Mae Davis Allen Genealogical Collection, generously shared by Cousin Barney Allen.

Back in February, I had to head down to DC for a work event. Now, I love visiting DC for so many reasons – the museums, the libraries and archives, the architecture, the history, and just strolling through some of the fun and funky neighborhoods. But one of the best things about visiting the city is that I have family there, and a lot of it. You see, my mom was born in DC, and through her mother, father, and step-mother, there are cousins upon cousins upon first- and second- and half- and step- and twice- and thrice-removed cousins there. So, when I head down, I’ll often make an effort to hang with family.

On this trip, I suggested dinner with two of my mom’s Cooper second cousins, La Verne and Shelia. They looped in their first cousin, Barney, and ultimately, Barney, La Verne and I ended up having dinner at Barney’s place, with Shelia on the phone. Now, here’s what you need to know: Barney’s mom, Willie Mae Davis Allen, was one of our family historians. And as I’ve recently learned, she was one of the family connectors who traveled from the Maryland outskirts of DC to attend birthday parties, family reunions, retirement parties, funerals, and all sorts of other get-togethers from California to Florida and points north, south, and in-between. And she kept records. Cousin Willie passed away last year, making Barney the keeper of the records. And, wow.

Years of family newsletters, part of the Willie Mae Davis Allen Genealogical Collection, generously shared by Cousin Barney Allen.

Long story short, thanks to Willie Mae’s efforts and Barney’s generosity and trust, I brought back with me over 80 funeral programs and almost a decade’s worth of family newsletters from the 1990s, with a few other documents mixed in. I know. I KNOW! If you have even the slightest interest in family history, you’re probably screaming right now, because you know how amazing this is! But I’m still going to tell you a few reasons I’m so excited:

1. These materials fill holes in my research. Only 3 of the funeral programs duplicate ones I already had in my collections from other sources. Several of them are ones I didn’t think I’d ever get my hands on, because they aren’t from the “main” branch of the family that so many of us connect to. And they are all treasure troves of information. 
   
2. These materials are amazing not just for family history, but for community history. I can see parts of the stories of Gough and Waynesboro, Georgia in these materials, of St. Petersburg and Miami, Florida, and of Washington, DC and beyond. I can see both northern and southern migration out of Burke County, GA. I can see church history, whether it’s Friendship Baptist Church in DC or Roberson Grove Baptist Church in Georgia. I can see Boggs Academy and Gibbs High School represented in these materials. And I can see networks between them! (Man, how to represent that visually???)
3. These materials help to make my unknown family real. I’ve never met - and won’t in this life - many of the folks mentioned in these materials. But they were known, they were real flesh and blood and spirit and activity, for people in my mother’s generation, in her mother’s generation, and so on. They were kids and grandparents and aunties and uncles sitting around in someone's backyard, or organizing a political meeting, or working on the car, or singing in church, or teaching at school.  Holding in my hands and reading materials about them that were so recently created – sometimes by my ancestors and their kin themselves – gives them shape and form for me in a strangely poignant way.

So, What Am I Doing / What Have I Done With Them?

Step 1: Created a Catalogue. Before I even left DC, I had created a basic catalogue of all the materials I’d be taking home with me to scan. This way, Cousins Barney, La Verne, and Shelia and I were all clear on what I had and was accountable to Barney for returning. I used Google Sheets for this, so I could share the live document with the cousins (and my mom, of course!). I noted full names, maiden names for the women when obvious, date of the funeral for the funeral programs, date of death for the obituaries, and the year, edition, and volume numbers for the family newsletters. I also noted when there were multiple original copies and when there was an original and a photocopy. And I made a note if there was significant staining, tearing, missing pages, or other issues with any of the materials. (Yes, I work in a museum, and yes, I was essentially condition-reporting, lol.)

The spreadsheet!

Step 2: Scanning! I scanned every funeral program, family newsletter, and other document in full color and saved them to Dropbox, then the folder links with the cousins. I tracked my progress in the spreadsheet, for my own sake, and so that anyone could check on my progress if interested. I’ll be honest, this process was kind of tedious, because I wanted to get everything digitized pretty quickly, so I wasn’t allowing myself to get (too) distracted by the actual information. (Did I still get a little distracted? Yes. So many times!)

Scanning!

 

Why was I trying to move so fast on this? You will never have such an irrational fear that your apartment will somehow burn to the ground than when you are holding precious material that doesn’t belong to you and that you are borrowing so that you can actually preserve them for the future!

Funeral Program files...

 

Anyway, like I said, this part was a little tedious. But, I accomplished a fair bunch of this while listening to virtual presentations during the RootsTech conference or watching movies on tv, so it wasn’t too bad.

...and Family Newsletter files!

Step 2.5: Sharing with My Mom. These are her people and she wanted to take a look!

Daughter of Elnora Cooper, Granddaughter of Noah Cooper and Nancy Thomas. Aka my mom.

Step 2.75: Returning the Originals! As I mentioned, the hard copies are not mine to keep - I borrowed them to digitize them. Now that that's completed, we've made a plan for me to return them, with some bonus family time thrown in. (We're going to dig into some photographs, y'all!)

Step 3: Integrating information. I’ve now started integrating the information from the funeral programs into my genealogy database (I use RootsMagic) and Ancestry.com. I’m looking for documents that verify dates, events, and relationships, as well. Whew, boy – there is so much information! But this is the work. And I love it! I’ll shift to the family newsletters when I’m done, or perhaps I’ll switch between them as my attention span directs.

 

So What's Next?

Here’s what I think I’ll do once I’ve completed the work mentioned above: 

• Add Keyword Search-ability: My scanning program doesn’t have OCR functionality built in, so the PDFs are not currently searchable. I’ll probably look into that as a next step, to make info easy to find.
• Name Indexing? I’m also thinking about making an every name index, so that you can easily find where a person is mentioned in every document in the collection. Maybe one for the institutions – churches, schools, businesses, etc. – as well.
• Seek Out Missing Material: I know we don’t have the complete run of the Abrams, Cummings/Cooper, Douse Family News newsletter. We’re missing: anything published before the second quarter of 1992, 4^th quarter 1992, 1^st and 3rd quarters 1993, 3^rd quarter 1995, 2 and 3^rd trimesters 1999, and anything after the first trimester of 2000. And what about funeral programs for siblings, parents, etc. of the folks who are currently represented. I’m always looking, but this makes that search feel a little more timely and exciting!
• Share More Broadly? My cousin is absolutely happy for me to share the materials I’ve scanned if family or researchers reach out. (I'll likely run newsletter requests through a "family filter," since there's some contact info on them.) But more and more libraries and archives are seeing the value in these sorts of materials, and we know people from across the country are looking for these sorts of materials as they embark on their own family and community history quests. Perhaps we should think about making a virtual and/or physical donation one day to something like the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center and/or archives or libraries in the communities where our family lived? This project went from zero to sixty very quickly, so I’m leaving that in my “a conversation for the future” pile at the moment.

I love a good project, and this is a great one! Many thanks to Cousin Willie for the work she did during her lifetime to help keep the family connected and to preserve our family history. And many thanks to Cousin Barney for being so generous with these materials. Bonus shout-outs to Cousins La Verne and Shelia for everything they do to help me, and all of us, remember our history. 

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Do you have any of the missing newsletters? Or a funeral program collection for our family that you'd allow me to scan? If so, please reach out! 

And if you're interested in something in this collection, let me know that, too!