Wrapping up Week 4 at CHM

I am continuing in the research and recovery phase of my practicum at Chicago History Museum.  As I work to recover women's names, I often come across some interesting stories.  There was one woman who had been living in Europe with her husband.  The husband was heading back to the U.S. to find and set up their new home and then the plan was that the wife would follow later.  However, the husband ended up returning to the U.S. on the Titanic.  He never made it home.  The wife was heartbroken and died a year later.  There was also a story about a well known Chicago businessman who was in love with another woman.  It went on this way for years.  When his wife died, he was finally able to marry the woman he loved, but then he died a year later.  

You might wonder where I am finding this information.  Well, it is sometimes surprising the level of detail that is written into obituaries!  Some of the stories come from there, others are from newspaper articles.  It is strange because my role is simply to find a name.  But often I have to really dig and read through information to find the name.  That is how I come across these fascinating stories.  But they always end the same way...  

On a lighter note, last week I was given an in-depth tour of the archival holdings at the museum.  The tour was given by the Head of Collections and two staff archivists.  Two of my tour guides were Dominican University grads!  I got to see the archives which were recently remodeled for better temperature and humidity control.  They also transferred everything to compact shelving which compresses and expands to provide much more overall storage space.  The archivists were excited to point out there is actually EMPTY shelving now!  Ha!  I found out that there are two off-site storage facilities and one of them is actually in the village where I live.  The Head of Collections mentioned that I could probably arrange a time to tour that facility.  I will definitely follow up on that!  

In addition to the new archival storage facility, I saw the clothing/costume storage area with an amazing collection of lovely and ornate hats.  And I also toured the three dimensional object storage area.  I saw lots of interesting and strange artifacts during the tour.  Letters from Martin Luther King Jr. (signed with his nickname, Mike.  Who knew?),  a teenager's scrapbook of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, and even an extremely large ice skate owned by Abraham Lincoln (it was wooden, like his teeth!).  I'm really enjoying this practicum and looking forward to the next stages of learning to update the catalog records with the names I have recovered.