Thronateeska archives get Daughters of American Revolution grant

ALBANY — Thanks to a grant from the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, some of Southwest Georgia’s most important historical documents can now be scanned and digitally preserved at the Thronateeska Heritage Center’s South Georgia Archive.

The $2,000 grant was made possible thanks to the support of the local Thronateeska Chapter of DAR, which sponsored the grant so that the South Georgia Archives can purchase professional camera equipment and software that will allow staff members to photograph and digitize some of the oldest and most irreplaceable documents in Thronateeska’s collection.

“This is pretty good for us,” Thronateeska Museum Curator Shay Meredith said of the grant. “It’s nice to have a grant of this size. With it we’ll be able to photograph things that are too big, too fragile and too awkward for a scanner.”

Meredith said the new equipment will be purchased soon, and that the new scanning project will get under way in early July and continue for about a year.

Over the course of the project, archive staff will photograph and digitize a variety of different items, including Albany city records, probate court documents and local newspapers, most of which are currently contained in large, bound books.

“We’ve got city minutes dating back to the founding of the city in the 1830s,” said Meredith. “Ballpark, we’re talking 50 to 60 volumes of materials, and each of those is going to have 600 or so pages, so it’s a lot.”

Since it was first opened in the fall of 2014, the South Georgia Archives, which was made possible through SPLOST funding, has become an important part of Thronateeska’s mission to preserve the history and culture of Albany and the surrounding area.

The archives’ genesis began when Thronateeska Executive Director Tommy Gregors had a chance conversation with Albany City Clerk Sonja Tolbert, who was lamenting the difficulty the city was having storing its old documents. Thronateeska was in a similar predicament with many of it’s older materials, so the decision was made to create the archives rather than hire an outside vendor to handle document scanning and storage.

To date, Meredith said the Thronateeska venture has completed slightly more than 12,500 scans for the historic archives and has a total of more than 671,500 in its database, which includes the Thronateeska collections and some record management for the city of Albany.

Although archive staff have already been able to digitize such a large number of documents, the equipment used thus far was purchased during construction of the archives, and any additional funding for archives’ needs has to come out of Thronateeska’s general fund. Since the organization also runs the Thronateeska Museum, the Thronateeska Science Museum and the Wetherbee Planetarium, little extra funding has been available to purchase additional equipment.

With the DAR grant, which is the first grant of its kind the archive has received, the organization can finally get the equipment needed to preserve some of the more precious documents that were at the forefront of the decision to create the archives in the first place.

“We are grateful for the generous support of the Daughters of the American Revolution,” said Meredith. “I think it’s tremendous that we have a local organization that is dedicated, like we are, to preserving the history of this area.”

Since preserving history is at the root of the DAR’s mission, it was an easy decision for the local chapter to sponsor the grant application to the national level.

“We’re all about history, patriotism and education, so we feel like the preservation of historical records is important to our organization,” said Kay Ragan, the regent of the Thronateeska DAR chapter. “People want to know where they came from, and we need to preserve these records of importance for future generations.”

Ragan explained that the local DAR chapter has long supported Thronateeska’s preservation and education efforts, so when members learned staff needed more advanced equipment to digitize some of the records, the grant idea was proposed and ultimately approved at the national level as part of the organization’s grants program that was started in 2010.

“We knew they were doing things that coincide with our values and ideals, so the members felt like this was a worthwhile project,” said Ragan. “Everybody needs to know their history.”

In addition to visiting the archives to see some of the collection, Meredith said true history buffs can also get involved in the preservation aspect by volunteering to help with the scanning.

“The public can request information, tours or research visits by emailing or calling me,” Meredith said. “We do accept walk-ins, but we can best serve visitors if they schedule ahead.”

Meredith can be reached at (229) 432-6955 or by email at [email protected]. The archives are open for walk-ins on Thursdays and Fridays from 1-5 p.m. The South Georgia Archives are located at Thronateeska Heritage Center, 100 W. Roosevelt Ave., in downtown Albany. To learn more about the archives and Thronateeska, visit www.heritagecenter.org.