We have had a beautiful Spring in my part of the South, but it will be the long, hot Summer before we know it. I think this is a good time to share some of the news that’s come out in the last few months on photographers working in the south, miscellaneous collections,  newspaper news, and a few other things, because there is always new and useful information coming out related to my research, and to yours.

Updates: Photographers working in the South

A very good post on the Library of Congress blog “Picture This”called “Caught Our Eyes: A Thought-Provoking Farm Security Administration Negative” caught my eye toward the end of February, and it lead me to other great FSA/OWI images. The photographs in this group  were made in the Hinesville, Georgia area. In order to build an Army camp that was  planned as an anti-aircraft artillery training center, eventually called Fort Stewart, residents were moved out as their property was gradually purchased. Many of these photographs reflect that displacement.

The photographer, Jack Delano, employed by the Farm Security Administration, was working in Georgia in the spring of 1941. In addition to the residents, he also photographed arriving soldiers. The Stewart camp grew to what is now over 280,000 acres across several southeast Georgia counties, including Long, Bryan, and Evans. Hinesville itself is in Liberty County.

An earlier post I noticed in this same “Picture This” blog relates to another photographer who worked in the South, Lewis Hine. Called Focusing on Lewis Hine’s Photographic Technique, reproductions used in this post depict children, laborers, and child laborers in South Carolina, West Virginia, and Mississippi. The Library of Congress holds two significant groups of Hine photographs, the images he made for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) and those he made for the American National Red Cross (ANRC) during the first World War.

Hine took photographs in thirteen different Georgia cities and towns. In addition to the Library of Congress’s two collection of Lewis Hine photos, see also The New York Public Library site for their images made by Lewis W. Hine. Search all these collections for Hine’s photographs made in Georgia and the other southern states.

The Digital Library of Appalachia provides online access to archival and historical materials related to the culture of the southern and central Appalachian region. The contents of the DLA are drawn from special collections of Appalachian College Association member libraries, including Berea, Brevard, and Tennessee Wesleyan colleges, and Carson-Newman, Kentucky Christian, and Lee universities, as well as many others.

Examples of images you can find on the DLA include 137 group portraits of Southern Gospel Singers (Berea College), twenty-four images related to Southern Baptist Vacation Bible Schools (Carson-Newman College), and fifty-six photos of student life (Tennessee Wesleyan). You will also find photos of musicians, and arts and crafts in many of these collections.

And last but I hope not least, I have made another update to my Early Georgia Photographers, 1841-1861: a Biographical Checklist. Please contact me with any questions, or post them as Comments to this blog. Again, the newest updates are in Blue text, and changes to names, addresses, or dates have been made to the entries for J. W. Hurt, Herman Husband, Giles T. Williams, and R. L. Wood.

Other Collections

The Cleveland Museum of Art released 30,000 high quality, free and open digital images from their collection in late January. Other museums have done this, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. All these museums’ images, including many photographs, can be searched via Creative Commons Search.

The Still Picture Branch of the National Archives announced it has digitized over 6,000 photographs from the U. S. Marine Corps in World War II and Korea. Included are images of USMC aircraft, the Marine Corps Band, artillery, atomic bomb testing in Nevada in 1952, communication equipment, commandants, the Cunningham Collection (early aviation photographs), insignia, medical evacuation (medevac), Marines on liberty, Navajo Indian code talkers, Medal of Honor recipients, enlistment posters, the surrender of Japan, and Japanese and Allied prisoners of war (POWs).

The WWII photographs cover the battles of Bataan, Bougainville, Cape Gloucester, Central Solomons, Corregidor, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Japan, Marshall Islands, Midway, New Britain, Okinawa, Philippines, Saipan, Tarawa, Tinian, and Wake Islands.

Captions and other descriptive information on the back of the photographs have also been digitized and they are asking the public to help them by reading and transcribing that information. Find out more about their Transcription Request, and the collection here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

News about Newspapers

I know I’ve said this before, but I cannot stress enough the importance of newspapers to my research. The amazing Ken Marks, of The Ancestor Hunt, very recently updated his “Southern States Birth, Marriage, and Death Collection”. Before he did that, last month (March, 2019), he once again added 435 new and updated newspaper links to his Southern States Online Historical Newspapers. Marks especially highlighted Kentucky, with the addition of 71 more newspapers, and Florida, with 26 new additions. Here are his links to the other southern sates:

Alabama – http://bit.ly/2I1ONcJ

Arkansas – http://bit.ly/2oQt688

Georgia – http://bit.ly/2F23DTE

Louisiana – http://bit.ly/2Dwp4X3

Mississippi – http://bit.ly/2CNhQhi

Missouri – http://bit.ly/2oIdpjl

North Carolina – http://bit.ly/2oJGriS

Oklahoma – http://bit.ly/2u8ACAm

South Carolina – http://bit.ly/2Dv1oT5

Texas – http://bit.ly/2DScj9u

Tennessee – http://bit.ly/2CJCzm8

Virginia – http://bit.ly/2EOzBTh

West Virginia – http://bit.ly/2CJB3A7

The Georgia Historic Newspapers, Digital Library of Georgia, recently added to their site all the newspapers from the older individual newspaper sites that had not yet been converted. New on their site are some newspapers from the cities of Jackson and Winder dating from the 1880s to the present.

The Dawson County Library, part of the Chestatee Regional Library System, has made a searchable historical newspaper database available. Newspapers covered are the Dawson News and Advertiser (1999-2015), Dawson County Advertiser and Dawson County News (1962-1999), Dawson County Advertiser (1888-1962), Mountain Chronicle (1879-1882), Cosmopolite (1923-1924), Dawson County News (1956-1962), and Dawsonville News (1884-1887).

Miscellany not to be Missed

A very nice blog post on the The Beauty of the Photogravure was created by the Special Collections folks at the University of St. Andrews, in the U.K. They wrote that the Photogravure,  a photo-mechanical process, is “one of the most evocative ways of reproducing photographs using the permanence of ink.” Although I only saw this post last month, it was apparently first posted in 2012! Better late than never, right? Lucky for us that with this particular topic, it isn’t important exactly when we read it.

A project to document all the places in Tennessee related to the Green Book (which began as the Negro Motorist Green Book in 1937), found that Tennessee had 238 different places listed over the years. The project included the Center for Historic Preservation, and was led by the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historian (SESAH). Many of the places that still exist were photographed. Read about that interesting project here. A poster that came out of this project can be downloaded for free for educational purposes.

Lastly, Family Tree Magazine published a Roundup: Free Digital History Collections at the end of March, that may prove useful to you. This list of four includes some sites I have mentioned, but here are the four links all in one place. The publisher of this magazine has declared bankruptcy. I have another year to go on my FTM subscription, I hope they can continue to publish, because it is always full of good information.

I hope you have gotten at least one good “bounce” out of this post like the soldiers and marines seen above did! I wish you the best of luck in your Hunting and Gathering for the summer, and — stay cool.

© E. Lee Eltzroth and Hunting & Gathering, 2019. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material, including her photographs, without written permission from this blog’s author is prohibited. The piece can be re-blogged, and excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to E. Lee Eltzroth and Hunting & Gathering, with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.