Upcoming Events:
- Family History Workshop and Community Scanning Day
2/18, 1:30pm to 4pm, SCPL Bornt Branch Library Meeting Room
If you’d like to work with our archivists to create digital copies of materials in your family’s collections, please bring up to 10 items to scan, such as:
- Single or multi-page documents such as newsletters or small maps
- Flat documents such as letters and posters up to 8 ½” x 11”
- Photographs up to 8 ½” x 11”
- 35mm negatives
- Slides
Please bring your own flash-drive or hard-drive, if you have one. If you don’t have a flash-drive or hard-drive, we can show you how to email the scans to yourself or upload the files to a digital drive (e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox)
Please be aware of copyright that limits what you can scan. If you created it, that means you have the copyright; if it was a photograph from a photography studio or newspaper, you may need their permission. We can explain more when you are here. Don’t digitize personal information like addresses, phone numbers, and social security numbers. That’s information that should stay private. Materials should be able to lie flat on a scanner. Fragile items are not recommended.
This event will not include the following:
- Audio
- Video
- Film
- Large rolled panoramic photographs, maps, or posters
- 3D Objects
If items brought to the event cannot be scanned at that time for any reason, participants will receive information on how to schedule a follow-up appointment for one-on-one assistance or other recommendations.
- Celebrating Black Educators in Schenectady: A Virtual Black History Discussion
2/27, 7-8:30pm, SCHS Facebook
Our Community Survey is now live! We invite members of the Black community to participate in developing the history, legacy, and memory of the community by completing our short surveys:
Individuals and Family Survey — answer questions about your personal and familial experiences in Schenectady
Organizational Survey — answer questions based upon your knowledge of a particular organization
Our community surveys ask a range of questions which will help to expand our knowledge of African American history, illuminate the diversity within the community, and recognize the culture and memory keepers who are already caring for the community’s historical records.
About the Schenectady African American Historical Records Project:
Acknowledging that primary sources are the keys to understanding history and access to those materials helps communities to connect to their past, the African American Historical Records Project will create an online catalog of historical records within the Black Community in Schenectady.
Our goal is to identify where those records are, what condition they are in, and how researchers can access them. We hope the catalog and the records uncovered during the project will become a foundation for future research, preservation, and education. African Americans have been part of Schenectady since colonial times, but their presence, activities, and experiences are significantly underrepresented in the collections available to the public in repositories like SCHS. Churches, community organizations, black-owned businesses, and individuals have their own historical collections. The catalog will connect those isolated collections and make them visible and available to the public.
The project received a grant award from the Documentary Heritage Program, an initiative of the New York State Archives. Funding for the survey phase of the project has been provided by Schenectady County and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Working with an advisory committee of prominent community members, we hope to engage the community in telling their own stories and preserving the materials that illustrate and complement the history and heritage.
There are a lot of different ways that people record their lives and experiences: church records, organization or business records, diaries, oral histories, letters, photographs, videos, music, and art. Our goal is to support preservation for all types of items created by African Americans in Schenectady and connected to the community’s history.
Thank you to our project committee members: Miki Conn, Sophia Delamar, Philip Fields, Julia Holcomb, Johan Matthews, Adonis Richards, William Rivas, Sarah Schmidt, and Walter Simpkins. Thank you to our consulting archivists: Micha Broadnax and Kijua Sanders-McMurtry.
Anyone looking for information on the African American Historical Records Project or wishing to participate in the survey should contact Marietta Carr at the Schenectady County Historical Society at 518-374-0263, option 3, or email her at librarian@schenectadyhistorical.org.