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At Fair Haven Library, a Troupe of Amateur Archivists

Kapp Singer | June 17th, 2024

At Fair Haven Library, a Troupe of Amateur Archivists

Beinecke Library  |  Fair Haven Library  |  New Haven Free Public Library  |  Arts, Culture & Community

IMG_7885Jennifer Coggins teaches a workshop on “Preserving Your History: Getting Started with Your Own Archives" at NHFPL's Fair Haven Branch.

When Adriana Hernández Bergstrom’s grandmother moved from Cuba to Florida, she brought with her hardly any mementos. But after arriving, she began to compulsively record everything. She took pictures at each of her children’s and grandchildren’s birthdays and saved the wrapping paper. She took pictures of important meals and saved the napkins. 

“There’s ephemera from every single one of those events,” Hernández Bergstrom said. “A lot of the details of her life were lost. She didn’t want that for us. She wanted our lives to be documented.”

On Thursday, Hernández Bergstrom arrived at the NHFPL’s Fair Haven Branch Library Programs Room to learn about how to save and organize that trove of family history. At a workshop on “Preserving Your History: Getting Started with Your Own Archives,” the Beinecke Library’s community engagement archivist Jennifer Coggins taught participants how to approach their towering, unruly stacks of family records.

The workshop was part of the Beinecke Library’s New Haven Community Archives Support program, which Coggins started developing two years ago. The purpose of the program is to help city residents think about organization strategies, learn about archival techniques, and provide access to equipment like scanners and acid-free folders. 

The program is meant to help people assemble their own individual archives, but also those of community institutions they’re part of, like churches. In addition to public workshops hosted at various NHFPL branches, Coggins also offers one-on-one consultations.

“Getting started on these kinds of projects can feel really daunting, especially if you have a lot of materials,” Coggins told the participants on Thursday evening. “But there are simple steps that make a big impact.”

“Why preserve your archive?” Coggins asked the audience to begin the workshop.

“As a first-generation American, what we do is precious,” Hernández Bergstrom answered. She started her own archival journey after her grandmother died in 2010, combing through boxes of pictures with her mother and brother, scanning them, and trying to catalog their contents in a spreadsheet. 

“It makes me feel like she’s right there,” Hernández Bergstrom said. On one trip, she recalls encountering a piece of wrapping paper with frogs printed on it, which brought her immediately back to one of her birthday celebrations. “I remember very viscerally our time together,” she said.

Her project to preserve her grandmother’s documents has felt all the more urgent with accelerating climate change and the associated property damage. This week, heavy rains hit South Florida, causing flooding and worrying Hernández Bergstrom about potential water damage.

In the workshop, Coggins discussed strategies to mitigate the risks of environmental damage to family archives. Something as simple as storing papers in the upper drawers of a file cabinet can make a big difference, she said. She also discussed how to select the proper materials for folders—it’s good to avoid PVC-based plastic sleeves, for example, as they can degrade over time and become oily—and which digital file formats are most durable.

For New Haven Academy teacher Fana Hickinson, the workshop was an opportunity to learn about how to handle historic newspapers. She is currently reading through old issues of The Open Gate News, a Black bimonthly newspaper published in New Haven in the 1960s and 1970s. The paper was edited by her grandfather, who she described as a troubling figure. She sees these archives as a way to face her difficult family history. 

“He was a terrible person,” Hickinson said. “I’m trying to reconcile what I know about him—stories that I know to be true from women and also the public persona he had as the editor of this magazine.” 

“It’s a hurtful and traumatic history, so I think there is interest there to correct the record,” she added.

Not only does Hickinson see the project as personally necessary, but she wants to make sure these newspapers are preserved for future researchers. The brittle, yellowing newsprint of The Open Gate News, which is currently held at the New Haven Museum, is falling apart. She said she came to the workshop to learn about ways that Coggins might be able to help her digitize it.

“If I’m going to go through and touch every single newspaper, I might as well be doing that in a way that’s useful to other people who might want to read it,” she said.

Throughout, participants discussed how to get others interested in family history. Many lamented the fact that their archival efforts seem to fall on deaf ears. But Coggins assured the room the value of keeping one’s history alive. “Just because they’re not interested now doesn’t mean they won’t really be grateful later on,” she said.

“One day historians will be looking back at this time and your perspectives will be valuable.”