Archival Practicum: Day 10

This week, I have a few quick things I want to write about. The first few are about archiving and preservation. To add to the whole tape saga, I've also been finding the occasional sticky note (that is also taped down on one side!!) that reads "BLURRY". Now, this is no doubt this was from the digitization crew at Family Search, but I also can't get over that they used two things that are huge no-nos in historic document preservation, sticky notes and duct tape! How do they not know?!

Also, here is another tape job that I did. Just wanted to show off my work.

As for interesting things in the patient files, I found the most recent document yet, a letter from 1989 asking for genealogy information on an ancestor who was a patient at the home! As someone who teaches genealogy classes at work, I thought this was pretty interesting, and the cool thing was that the admin staff at the time gave them copies of the requested documents! How neat is that! However, this did bring up the dates for the collection in terms of the finding aid I will later be working on. I checked with the archivist, and she said that I wouldn't need to update the date range, since it's an outlier and the bulk of the documents are still from the early 1920's to the late 1950's.

Also, three interesting stories from the files include the case of a lost (stolen) box of money that was collected for a club tournament. Just from reading the patient's letters it was obvious that he stole the money; his story was cartoon villain level of outlandish. Thankfully, he fessed up and wasn't expelled.

Another interesting but sad story was of a very sick man who was twice removed from the home by his family, and then later they tried to get the home to readmit him. Sounds like the patient's family didn't get along with each other and were using the poor man as a pawn. The last time he was removed by one of his siblings (without the permission of the home's doctors), he ended up passing away on the drive back to California. Then his local union tried to send his body back to the home for burial in the UPH plot at Evergreen Cemetery. They were rejected since the home's plot was only for patients who passed away at the home, which was something I learned. Still though, the whole story was tragic to read, since it sounds like his wishes were to be buried there.

The last interesting bit I read about today was the case of a patient who was found passed out on a ranch a mile east of town in the snow in the 1930's. Thankfully, he was okay, but he had no recollection of how he got there, and there were no witnesses and no transportation out that way. It's kind of hard to imagine, since that area has been residential suburbs in the middle of town for decades now, but back then it was empty.

Stats:

• Files processed: DALY - DOHERTY, 72 folders (507 total folders processed)

• Hours: 8hrs (80 total hrs)