Community Engagement with Laurens County Teacher’s Monthly Reports

The Laurens County Library has enjoyed a new level of community engagement thanks to the Digital Library of Georgia’s subgranting program. We have received invitations to speak outside of the library about our digitization project, and community members are contributing their personal photos and stories to the library’s collection. Furthermore, the excitement around our project has generated additional financial support and new community-based partnerships, both of which will allow the library to continue our digitization efforts.

Ms. Susie O’Neal holds teacher monthly reports from Mary Grove School, a school she attended as a child. These reports are from 1936, one year before Ms. O’Neal was born.
Ms. Susie O’Neal holds teacher monthly reports from Mary Grove School, a school she attended as a child. These reports are from 1936, one year before Ms. O’Neal was born.

In the spring of 2018, the library received a $5000 subgrant to digitize a collection of teacher monthly reports from 57 of our county’s African American schools. Most of these records date from the 1930s. They share valuable information such as each teacher’s name and address, the names and ages of students, attendance rates, and the quality of the schoolhouse. All of this information is now available online and freely accessible to everyone. Such an increase in access to information is remarkable when one considers that these schools had previously received little recognition in our county’s published histories.

One of the highlights from the past year occurred when library staff was invited to attend the Old Schools Picnic, an annual gathering of alumni from the various African American schools of Laurens County. Not only were we able to promote the online records, but also to speak to over 400 people in attendance about the importance of their schools’ history to our larger community history. Attendees started to appreciate the importance of sharing their stories and experience about their own educational upbringing when they learned that their alma maters were the result of mergers of long-forgotten older church-based schools.

Ms. Beverly Brown, Director of the Oconee Regional Library System, attended the picnic and spoke with attendees. When asked about the community impact of the DLG subgrant, Ms. Brown states, “Our library patrons are very excited to have digital access to the African American school records, and by having these records digitized, we are helping to preserve the rich history of these schools. Thanks to the digitization subgrant, the Teacher’s Monthly Reports online collection reaffirms the history of these schools in our community memory, helping to safeguard the fuller history of Laurens County and our people.”

– Cristina Hernández Trotter, Head of Reference and The Heritage Center, Oconee Regional Library System

 

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Top Five DLG Sites for Genealogists

Interest in genealogical research has grown rapidly over the last half century and the advent of the internet has opened up a whole new world to those interested in researching their family history. Resources that were once difficult to locate and navigate are now readily available to anyone with a computer and a little enthusiasm. It is for this reason we will attempt to channel Casey Kasem, and present the following “Top Five” list of Digital Library of Georgia sites for genealogists:

1. Georgia Historic Newspaper sites

Image of newspaper article with Headline "Champion Chicken Thief Still Busy". (Georgia Historic Newspaper sites)

The Digital Library of Georgia has online newspaper archives for over thirty newspaper titles in eight cities, which are comprised of over three hundred thousand newspaper page images, ranging from 1808 to 1986 (the bulk of which is pre-1923). The newspapers are word searchable and can be browsed through by title and date. They are a wonderful source for obituaries, election results, birth announcements, estate sale ads, trial notices, and just plain old small town gossip. The newspaper archive sites currently available in the Digital Library of Georgia include the Atlanta Historic Newspapers Archive, the Columbus Enquirer Archive, the Milledgeville Historic Newspapers Archive, the Macon Telegraph Archive, the Southern Israelite Archive, and the Red and Black Archive.

2. Gordon County, Georgia Obituaries

One of the Digital Library of Georgia’s most recent projects, this site features obituary clippings printed in the Calhoun Times and in several other, out-of-print, Gordon County newspapers, ranging from the early 19th century into the present day. The database contains over 46,000 digitized clippings, which can be searched by keyword and date, making it a quick and easy task to follow families through generations of life in Gordon County.

Image of A Celebration of Triumph for Tuskegee Airman Cassius Harris. (African American Funeral Programs from the East Central Georgia Regional Library)

3. African American Funeral Programs from the East Central Georgia Regional Library

This database contains over one thousand funeral programs from the East Central Georgia Regional Library’s print collection. The site, which largely focuses on the Augusta, Georgia area (but contains programs from around the state and country), includes programs ranging from 1933 to 2008. Users can navigate the site by performing keyword searches or browsing the collection by name, city, date, and funeral site. The programs usually include small biographies that contain information useful to genealogists, including educational degrees and church memberships. The site even has a few programs of national historic significance (Tuskegee Airman Cassius Harris, right).

4. Centennial Alumni Catalog and the Catalog of the Trustees, Officers, Alumni and Matriculates of the University of Georgia at Athens, Georgia, 1785-1906.

Think you have a distant relative associated with theImage of 1906 catalog of students  organized by class and are indexed by name at the end of the text. These questionnaires include information on marriages, professions, honors, memberships, and military service. (Centennial Alumni Catalog and the Catalog of the Trustees, Officers, Alumni and Matriculates of the University of Georgia at Athens, Georgia, 1785-1906.) University of Georgia? This is a good place to start! These two digitized catalogs contain a wealth of information on University alumni and employees that could be useful for genealogists. The Centennial Alumni Catalog is comprised of over 1,700 biographical questionnaires of people who matriculated at the University of Georgia. These questionnaires include information on marriages, professions, honors, memberships, and military service. The 1906 catalog (see image, right) is far more comprehensive in its list of university attendees and employees, but contains less detail. Students in this catalog are organized by class and are indexed by name at the end of the text.

5. Georgia Death Certificates, 1919-1927

This Georgia Archives collection contains thousands of digitized early 20th century death certificates from Georgia that are searchable by name, date, county, and even certificate number. The information contained in the death certificates has also been transcribed and is presented below each digitized image of the document for user convenience. These death certificates include information on name, birthdate, city of birth, date and city of death, parents and spouse’s names, sex, race, and ethnicity.

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