My son and I had a fascinating morning at the North Carolina State Archives Friday. He was there to do research for his National History Day project on World War I. This was a new experience for us both and we loved digging through the primary sources to be found there.
First you have to search through a finding aid. We looked through a volume on their military collections and a volume on private collections. Our first selection was a private collection of a college professor, Dr. Daniel Hill. It was mostly letters. As we read through, we began to form a picture of parts of this man's life. It turned out that the letters relating to WWI were about his son who was initially rejected because of his physical size. As we continued to dig further, we saw the trail of his father writing to people he knew and persons of influence to find a place for his son in the war effort. It did not lead to information pertinent to my son's project, but we certainly enjoyed the discoveries we made.
We did eventually find several items that he wanted photocopied or scanned including a booklet on the specific activities of two units in the war and two aerial maps of France. He will need to turn to the internet to look for other primary resources for his project but I look forward to future trips to the archive.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
