Gone but no longer forgotten, Bel Air Police searching for family of fallen officer from 1920. Source: Baltimore Sun, July 8, 2015
While working on a lecture related to women’s suffrage in Maryland, I tripped across some records about a Bel Air police officer falling in the line of duty in 1920. The memory of this tragedy had been lost as time moved on, so I handed the information over to the Bel Air Police Department. A detective immediately got to work on documenting the incident.
To support the department’s investigation, I picked up those fading traces in the historical records. After finishing my fieldwork in Harford County, Annapolis and Baltimore, I provided a historical records report to the agency.
Recently, Bel Air completed its work and the officer’s ultimate sacrifice will no longer forgotten. He is going to be listed on the National Law Enforcement Memorial. Over the decades, I have found officers in Wilmington, Clayton, and Crisfield who fell the line of duty, but were never listed on memorials, nor remembered n their communities. In those places, a similar process generally happened.
A collaborative event between Wilmington University and the Wilmington Public Library celebrating the 95th anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendement to the Constitution guaranteeing the right of women to vote in the United States will be presented August 4, 2015.
Mike Dixon, an adjunct history professor at the University will lead the discussion. The free program takes place Tuesday, August 4, at 6 PM at the Wilmington Public Library on Rodney Square.
The Delmarva region has many helpful research repositories for studying the past. Many are found in public libraries, and in that group there is the M. Virginia Webb Memorial Maryland Room at the Dorchester County Public Library (DCPL).
I have used this collection periodically over the years, and last week I needed to examine newspapers from the top of the 20th century. As I got stated I found that a major upgrade in special collections had been made since my last trip, which shouldn’t have surprised me as this fine institution has always provided excellent service.
DCPL had retired a cranky, decades old analog microfilm reader with a state-of-the-art computer workstation. The aging analog machine was in constant use by genealogists, local history researchers, and curious types, and while it got the job done, it was showing its age.
DCPL unveiled this new digital microfilm reader/scanner about two months earlier. It doesn’t look like the old ones most researchers have used somewhere. It consists of a computer, image management software, a small desktop scanner, and a large horizontal monitor, which allows you to see the full page.
In addition to reading and printing the microfilm, it allows for extensive image manipulation and the creation of PDFs and JPGS, which you may save to a flash drive. You may also enhance the image digitally, an important addition as most of us are familiar with the eye strain created by trying to read film that is too light or too dark.
This new unit makes the data collection process much easier, and it is a user-friendly machine. Without any instruction, I effortlessly used it and acquired the data I needed.
Beyond this upgrade, the Maryland Room is a strong resource with books and other materials. There are courthouse records, including land, probate, and court records. The newspapers include the full run of the Cambridge Daily Banner and other titles published in the county. There is much more, including city directories, pension applications, and more.
Thank you, Dorchester County Public Library, for providing such a strong heritage-oriented collection and for keeping up with the times. I see I have lots more work to do in Dorchester County.
Since 2015 marks the 95th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, I have been examining the topic of extending the right to vote to women. While investigating the regional perspective, I recalled the work of Helen Tierney, professor emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin (UW). A women’s studies scholar, she helped establish the program at UW-Platteville as the discipline grew out of the resurgence of the women’s movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Scholarship was scarce “in the brand-new world of women’s studies” and what was available on “the other half of humanity” was scattered in various academic fields, Dr. Tierney observed. Thus she decided to publish the Women’s Studies Encyclopedia to meet the needs for an authoritative reference. When the title appeared in 1989, the Library Journal called the first edition a “best reference book,” adding that it “was a landmark achievement providing concise definitions and historical context for students and scholars alike.”
Upon retiring from academia in the mid-1990s as the dean of the history department, Dr. Tierney returned home to the Newark area. After a period, she started volunteering at the Historical Society of Cecil County about the time we reactivated the Society’s newsletter to provide members with a value added product. Dr. Tierney took on the task of managing our serial publication since we didn’t have an assigned editor and for a number of years she carefully produced a quarterly, bringing high quality, original articles to readers.
During her retirement she also decided to update and expand the Encyclopedia since research on women had proceeded rapidly, feminist thought had grown and branched out, and conditions for women had “changed markedly in some area of life, for good and for ill, and little in others.” While editing submissions, the professor added new entries to the expanding body of knowledge, and she was interested in how the women’s suffrage movement had evolved in Maryland and Delaware.
I recall Helen studying those old Delmarva newspapers to see what elusive leads could be uncovered. It can be challenging to find evidence of emerging social movements and civil disobedience that are centered outside the regional norms in local weeklies. Of course, the highly respected academic with a doctoral degree in ancient Greek history from the University of Chicago was fully aware of the limitations of her sources. But, research requires a careful study to validate or rule out the availability of traces to the past, and I remember those long ago conversations as she unearthed elusive pieces of surviving evidence.
Helen died October 31, 1997, just days after she penned the introduction to the new volume, but her colleagues, family and publisher arranged for the second edition, a three volume work, to be brought to term. The family donated Dr. Tierney’s papers to the Historical Society of Cecil County, so as my research interest turned to this civil disobedience movement, I recently examined her field notes to follow her line of investigation on the regional perspective. The data is scarce as anyone working with social movements in rural areas will recognize, but the surviving materials from Dr. Tierney’s labors nearly twenty years ago gave me the perspective of the nationally recognized scholar on this untapped regional subject. She would be pleased to see that her scholarship is tapped for regional studies.
