While the official meeting for the grant has yet to be scheduled, I am proceeding full steam ahead with the creation of the “proof of concept” deliverable that I discussed last week.
This week, I began writing the full Clio entry word documents for the tour, which includes a short overview, a backstory essay with footnote citation, images, and resources for further learning. So far, only one is entirely complete, but it has been reviewed and approved by my supervisor so I know I’m on the right track! I hope to complete the rest of the entries by midweek next week which should allow me to get the entries uploaded to Clio and then linked together as a tour. I’m hoping that I have enough time between then and the internship showcase to have a few test runs with a sample range of visitors to assess whether I’ve achieved my goals.
Something else I’ve done this week was to comb through the Florida State Archives digitized collections to search for images to use. It’s important to me that I not only find the best images possible, but that they aren’t the same images that are often repeated in other Orlando history sources. Thankfully, this effort was fruitful as I located an image of the Jonestown neighborhood (which originally surrounded Greenwood’s northern border).
This particular image has been used frequently, but it was attributed to the collection of the Orange County Regional History Center. However, they were unable to locate it when I asked for more specific information on it. The reason for that was that it wasn’t in their collection at all! The best part about this discovery is that the original gave details on the photographer, H. A. Abercromby. When I searched for more images in the state archive by him, I came up with this photograph of two men with mules, also from Orange County in the same general date range as the picture of the Jonestown flood image. It even has a similar “patina.”
Given that I know that there were livery stables in Jonestown, it is entirely possible that this image is of Jonestown residents! Of course, this is only conjecture, but I think the connection is worthy of mention and possibly inclusion in the Clio entry about Jonestown.
In addition, I was able to visit the West Oaks Branch Library and Genealogy Center yesterday and obtain a high resolution scan of a page I had noticed a few months ago in a 1982 survey of Greenwood Cemetery conducted by the DAR. This page had some incorrect notations and the images look to be older than 1982, but given that the monuments pictured still stand, I’m confident of what they are. With the high resolution image in my possession, I was able to play around with it on photoshop and restore the individual pictures a bit since they were quite faded. I wasn’t able to make them much clearer, but these are the oldest images of the cemetery that I’ve located so far, which I’m just thrilled about! I hope that we can locate someone more skilled in restoration that I am to really make these images shine, though the added color really makes them seem much closer to the present than the faded originals.
Scroll through the images below:
Comments