It is Summer! There’s so much new information out there to help us with our summer photographic research that I want to share with you. In alphabetical order by state, followed by some miscellaneous sources very possibly of use to you.

Florida:

Jacqui Love Thornell and her husband Kwasi Thornell have made the largest ever photography donation to Broward’s County’s African American Research Library Cultural Center (ARLCC) in Fort Lauderdale. The collection has more than 1,300 photographs, documenting African American life from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. Love Thornell, a human resource executive for several major media companies, retired and began collecting photographs and wanted to go beyond stereotypical images of Black people. Originally from Miami, Thornell, who has an Ed. M. from Harvard University, envisioned her expansive collection ultimately donated. She chose South Florida to donate the collection. Now digitized, the images can be viewed from anywhere. Read about the collection in the South Florida Times.

Georgia:

It has been awhile, but it was announced that there is a new addition to the Foxfire Book series, begun in 1972, on Appalachian history and culture. Called The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Women: Stories of Landscape and Community in the Mountain South, it was released in March, and is edited by Kami Ahrens, Curator & Director of Education at the Foxfire Museum, in Mountain City, GA. It contains accounts of 21 women, from throughout the region, 1967 to 2021. Each story highlights their different experiences in Appalachia, and how the culture has changed over time. See a film on the Foxfire Museum here.

There are numerous Georgia postcards found on Ancestry.com if you have a subscription, and often there are free trials or free weeks if you do not. Do a search in the U.S. Historical postcards for any state, or see the Historical Postcard Collection for other countries. For Georgia there are postcards from almost every city or town. Narrow your search for what you need. You can enlarge any image, and downloads can be made with the little “view image” button, then click the “wrench” in the list to the right.

Ken Marks has updated the “Free Online Georgia Digital Archives” section of his website this May. In particular the section of Georgia “Obituaries and Obituary Indexes” is newly updated.

Kentucky:

Portraits and Dreams, a 60-minute film, revisits photographs created by Kentucky schoolchildren in the 1970s and the place where the photos were made. The film recounts the students, their work as visionary photographers, and their lives since then. This is one of the independent documentaries on PBS, which was part of Season 3, 9/7/2020 in the POV series, check your local PBS station.

A piece called “When the Bench Breaks” recently appeared on the Library of Congress blog, Picture This, depicting a funny event at a fish fry photographed by Marion Post Wolcott, in August 1940, near Louisville, KY.

North Carolina:

The Roland L. Freeman Collection is now part of the Southern Folklife Collection at the UNC-Chapel Hill’s University Wilson Special Collections Library. A gift from the Kohler Foundation, this collection documenting Black life in the twentieth century, will be available for research later this year. The collection has nearly 24,000 slides, 10,000 photographic prints, 400,000 negatives and 9,000 contact sheets, and includes publications and an archive of Freeman’s papers. Roland Freeman’s career spans more than fifty years of documenting Black communities, public figures and folk art and artisans.

Miscellaneous sources:

The Moving Image and Sound Branch and the Motion Picture Preservation Lab at the National Archives recently collaborated on a large project to transcribe textural records accompanying the film reels digitized for the U.S. Army Signal Corps Historical Films project. A post in the blog “The Unwritten Record,” from the National Archives, is called “Queens of the Air:  American Women Aviation Pioneers,” and it documents four amazing women in aviation through biographies and photographs.

The FEDLINK Federal Library Directory, from the Library of Congress, includes a map pulled directly from the FEDLINK Federal Library Directory, which visualizes the more than one thousand federal libraries located around the world. By clicking on a specific dot, which correspond by color to a department, branch, or other organization, you can see all of the recorded information associated with that library. For example, the red dots on the map represent Department of Defense libraries.  To go to a specific library, click the “Zoom in” button on the left side of the map (+ symbol) or use the scroll wheel of your mouse. You can use the search bar in the top right corner and type the name of the library that you are seeking, even if you use just a part of the library name.

Moving from maps to all the visual arts — the Georgia Museum of Art participates in the National Endowment for the Arts’ Blue Star Museums program every summer. Free museum admission is offered to military families from Memorial Day to Labor Day. This online exhibit of artists in their collection who served in the military went up in 2020, during their pandemic-related closure, but has since been updated. Organized chronologically, it includes artists both in and beyond the United States. Some artists were also photographers. Angelo De Benedetto was a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the First Photo Mapping Squadron during WWII.

….and finally — Here is an interesting late 2022 piece from the Postcard History website on the Cherokee Nation as centered in the American Southeast.

I hope there was something in this short list of newer sources that inspires your hunting and gathering of facts and images. If there’s another group of tips to help us along the research path, I will post this autumn or early winter. Until then have a wonderful summer. I wish you some very cool experiences!

© E. Lee Eltzroth and Hunting & Gathering, 2023. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material 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.