Week 11: History Harvest

 

    Hello everyone, and welcome back to my blog. If you did not read the first entry of mine, my name is Hiram Davila. I am a student at the University of Central Florida and will be graduating this semester. This blog post will be following my internship with RICHES Digital Archive throughout the Spring 2023 semester.

    To begin this week, I began working on my assignment that I got last week. To recap, my assignment was to take all the oral histories that RICHES has conducted, filter out the ones where the interviewee was African American, when it took place, a link to said oral history, and a brief description. I have gone through about 30-45 of the videos now, but I have a lot more to go, but I am making steady progress. I made myself a table inside of Excel that helps expedite the process tremendously and helps me keep all the videos organized. 

    The “main event” for me this week regarding my internship was an event called “History Harvest”. As I stated last week, these are events that RICHES puts on in different communities where we ask the community members to come to us with their histories and they sit down and give us an oral history, or they give us items to scan into our collections. This was my first real History Harvest that I went to. The last one I was unfortunately late to, but it was also in conjunction with another event going on at the Rosenwald school. This event was specifically for people to come see the RICHES team and let them tell us their history.

    The event was a major success. There were a lot of people that came out to talk to us. I was helping scanning the items and putting them into folders so they were easier to manage and also talked to many of the people there. One of the highlights was talking to a World War 2 veteran who allowed us to copy pictures of his time in Germany as a chef and some pictures of his family. I was able to relate to him because my mother grew up in Germany and was also in the military. I found a lot of similarities between the gentleman and my mother in regards to their perspective on Germany as a place to live.

    Without a doubt, however, perhaps the highlight of my college experience was at this event. The first item that was brought in was by a man that was helping run the event out of the Zellwood Community Center. He brought us first a large binder filled with stories that he recorded down that his parents told him when he was in his childhood. The second was a hymnal book that was brought to Florida by his great-great… grandmother. The book was in French, and the first page said it was printed in the 1790s. The book was so old, and was crumbling (figuratively) in my hands. I was extremely gentle when handling it while getting the scans. It is one of the oldest objects that I have touched. It was a great experience and the event as a whole went great. I hope that I will be able to experience another History Harvest while interning, or I might just volunteer to help RICHES out afterwards as this was a very enjoyable and eye-opening experience into the world of public history.