This type of grant support plays a crucial part in the J.M. Longyear Library’s mission to provide state-of-the-art care to its collections, create innovative public programming, and enhance the community’s understanding of its own documentary history. It also provided me with an opportunity I would not have otherwise had to develop my professional skills in the area. Because I am a member of the Michigan Oral History Association’s Board of Directors, the support of the MRHC and the Library of Michigan in taking this class will directly translate into a positive statewide impact.

The class started with an overlook at the beginnings of the organized field of oral history, and for this most people point to the 1907 efforts made by a Minnesota woman named Frances Densmore. Working under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution and on behalf of the U.S. Government’s recently established Bureau of American Ethnology, Densmore recorded songs and stories by Native American people across the country onto phonograph cylinders.

Of course, this was not the beginning of the practice of oral history altogether. Oral history is both an ancient and a modern practice of preserving information between generations through storytelling and recitation. Another early development in the organized field of oral history was to capture this verbal knowledge in the written word, instead of or sometimes in addition to audio recording. Beginning in 1936, during the Great Depression, the U.S. Works Progress Administration sent educators, scholars, and writers to the American South. These people worked to transcribe the oral stories of formerly enslaved people in their own words, with the knowledge that future historians would benefit from personal insights into this fundamental part of the American experience.

In 1893, a young Marquette man named Homer H. Kidder was home from his schooling at Harvard College when he began to write down oral histories told to him by Chief Charles Kawbawgam, his wife Charlotte Kawbawgam, and his brother-in-law Jacques LePique. This nineteen-year-old boy spent days listening to and transcribing the oral stories, which were translated for him from the Ojibwe language into “heavily accented” English in real time. Eventually this manuscript would be preserved in a Philadelphia archive and edited into a published volume by a local researcher, Arthur Bourgeois. Chief Kawbawgam’s biographer, Tyler Tichelaar, claims that Kidder’s Ojibwa Narratives “may be considered the first oral history program in America,” although they have not received widespread recognition as such.

Lew Allen Chase

Not long after, around 1921, the Marquette County Historical Society’s recording secretary, Lew Allen Chase, began conducting a similar project. Chase, and later his history students at Northern Normal School, invited older pioneer citizens of Marquette to fill out biographical questionnaires. The forms solicited genealogical information on their place of birth, when and how they came to the area, and what recollections they had from the early days of living here. In many cases, it seems these recollections were given to Chase orally and recorded onto the questionnaires, sometimes adding up to three or four additional sheets to capture it all. A selection of these interview sheets have been made available online through our partnership with the Upper Peninsula Digital Network (UPLINK), with the full collection available for research in the John M. Longyear Research Library.

Alongside providing access to published and unpublished oral history transcriptions like those of Kidder and Chase, the Longyear Library also collects and preserves audio-visually recorded oral histories. The earliest oral history in our AV collections is an interview with August and Edward Anderson by Mort Neff, conducted in 1945. The brothers were interviewed about commercial fishing on their family vessel, the Peter A., in Marquette’s harbor. The original recording was donated to the Marquette County Historical Society as a set of acetate discs. Librarians over time have preserved the recording by migrating it to more stable formats, beginning with audiocassettes and then moving to CD in 2003; today, anybody can listen to the recording as a digital file in the library’s reading room.

Next week, the second part of this article will explain how oral histories capture the unique perspectives of past community members and discuss the benefits of learning from their words in the modern day. In the meantime, if you would like to be involved in the MRHC’s oral history efforts or if you want to learn more about recording your own oral histories, I encourage you to reach out! I can be contacted at emi@marquettehistory.org or by phone at 906-226-3571.