My name is Emerald Williams and I am from Greenwood, South Carolina. Greenwood is a fairly small city in what we call The Lakelands, but for our size, we have an excellent local history museum. Our main floor exhibits a replica of our early 1900s main street, and we have over 45,000 items in our collection. My job this summer was to go through some of these items we have in our basement and to determine whether or not we have a record of that item, and, if not, to make a record. Most of my work consisted of labeling items as FIS, or Found In Storage. This just means that until we can determine who gave the item to the museum or when it was given, the item is assigned a temporary number. I lost count as to how many items I “bagged and tagged,” but it was more than a few. I only worked for 7 hours a day, for 3 days a week, for 2 months, but in that short amount of time, I learned years of history.
The most fascinating part of my job was re-discovering items that no one had seen in years. Some items were a little mundane, such as a rock or a taxidermied owl. But other items like an old metal hairclip, a cookbook from the 1950s, and medicine bottles intrigue me because these were once someone’s personal belongings. A woman pinned her hair back with this clip while she baked for her family or during her job in a factory making weapons during World War II. Letters and photographs are always interesting glimpses into another person’s life, but actually holding an item through glove protected hands that someone used, really brings weight and depth to their life. Old keys whisper secrets and cracked and rusted cookware fills the senses with home-cooked Southern food. Huge railroad spikes pound away loads of stories in my head.
These artifacts not only represent another era in history, but an era in an individual’s life. Imagine 50 years from now your cell phone is in a museum basement. All of those conversations you had with your mom, those texts you sent to your boyfriend, the photos you shared with your friends, don’t mean anything to the summer intern working in a basement. This summer, my job was to find items, label them, and give them a little history if none could be found. My job was to uncover stories.
