When The Good Guys Do The Right Thing, Everyone Comes Out On Top

Every once in a while, things fall into place and the good guys do the right thing.  Then everybody wins.

Yesterday, my copy of The Manuscript Society News (Vol 33, No 1) arrived in the mail.  Among the many interesting articles was librarian Sam Fore’s description of the private and independent Harlan Crow Library in Dallas, Texas, driving home the point that a researcher needs to cast a broad net in search of manuscript material.

For example, while the complete set of autographs from each of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence and each of the sitting Presidents would not be out of place in this kind of collection, the manuscript journal of Georgia delegate William Pierce, Jr. that includes his “character sketches” of all the other delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention would no doubt provide a unique insight into the gentlemen who shaped the nation.  Similarly, artist Gilbert Stuart’s own handwritten 1795 list of those who were to receive copies of his portrait of George Washington is interesting in its own right.

Note: this is truly a "private" library, attached to the personal residence of real estate mogul Harlan Crow.  You see photos of the interior here.

Still, back to the “good guys - do the right thing” idea…

On page 21 of the News, a short paragraph related that the Jersey City (NJ) Free Public Library found a manuscript volume from the 18^th century in their collection.  Specifically, it was a transcription of the 1749 – 1755 court records of Stafford County Virginia that had been copied in 1795 by the then- Stafford County deputy court clerk John Fox.  It had been “liberated” from the Virginia courthouse during the Civil War by a captain of the Fourth New York Regiment and brought north, probably as a “war prize.”  Eventually, it came to rest in Jersey City.

In any case, the good folks at the Jersey City Public Library did the right thing and repatriated the volume to Stafford County, Virginia – its rightful owner - after its century and a half vacation in New Jersey.

Why is this important on several levels?

If you do Virginia research, you probably already know that Stafford is one of those “burned” counties where many records were destroyed during the Civil War.  In fact, the Library of Virginia lists Stafford as “almost hopeless” in its online research aid.  So, any time anything gets back to Stafford, it’s good news.

By the way, for those with an interest in manuscripts, documents, autograph collecting and all historic things hand-written, you might want to investigate becoming a member of the Manuscript Society.   

You can learn more by visiting the Society’s website at: www.manuscript.org.

Digitization Done Right!

In my earlier post on document digitization/preservation (see "Saving Your Family Stuff" in the blog archive), I suggested that digitization and preservation were both good ideas, but were not exactly synonymous. In fact, both things need to happen.

Here’s a great example of digitization done right.

The archivists at the Library of Virginia (LVA), as part of the Civil War Legacy 150 Project (that’s the Virginia Civil War Sesquicentennial), are traveling around the state, digitizing privately held documents from the Civil War era.  This won’t preserve the actual documents themselves, but it will, in the words of the Virginia archivists “…preserve their valuable intellectual content.”

Later this month (September 18th), they’ll be at the Meyera Oberndorf Central Library in Virginia Beach from 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM, available to scan “…letters, pension materials, military passes, discharge papers, diaries, hand-drawn maps, and other Civil War–era manuscripts.”

Ultimately, the scans (i.e., “intellectual content”) will be available to researchers at LVA.

Amen to that!