These envelopes, filled with a multitude of information, are a great resource for researchers and individuals looking to learn more about Vance County residents, students, and schools. The front of the envelopes include a students’ name, address, date of birth, years they attended school, which Vance County school they went to, how many days they attended, if they were promoted, and noted if they moved out of the county.
Due to the inclusion of medical records and other sensitive personal information, the content within the envelopes were not digitized. If you are interested in learning more about the documents inside of the envelopes, please reach out to the Henderson Institute Historical Museum for more information.
To learn more about the Henderson Institute Historical Museum, please visit their website.
Photographs of people discussed in the book are included
Written in 1988, the book contains vignettes about many Black residents of Vance County during the 20th century. The book is broken up into chapters about farm families, and town families, and then by different occupations in the county. An amazing resource particularly for genealogists, Contributions… is full text searchable, making it easy to search names quickly!
Collage of the covers of the recently digitized Henderson Junior Woman’s Club scrapbooks (not to scale). Clockwise from upper left: JWC (Junior Woman’s Club) 1989, JWC 1978, JWC 1991, JWC 1974, Week of the Young Child (1979-1986), JWC 1993, JWC 1952, JWC 1975, Bicentennial Trees (1977).
The recently digitized scrapbooks from Perry Memorial Library capture both the activities of the Henderson Junior Woman’s Club and the distinct personalities of the women who created them. Each of the nine scrapbooks has its own quirks, whether it’s the Vance County Bookmobile carved into the wooden cover of the 1952 volume, the delightful illustrations in volumes 1974 and 1975, the entirely Charlie Brown-themed 1978 volume, or the lovely needlepoint scene adorning the cover of the 1989 volume. It is clear that many painstaking hours went into crafting these informative and artistic records of club activities and achievements.
Page from Vance County Week of the Young Child Scrapbook.
Most of the scrapbooks document the community service work and fundraising the club did over the previous year; they also contain information on clubwomen. There are two scrapbooks devoted to special topics, however: the Vance County Bicentennial Trees Book and the Vance County Week of the Young Child Scrapbook. The Bicentennial Trees Book was made by the Vance County Bicentennial Commission, whose goal was to plant 1776 trees in Vance County to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the founding of the United States. It documents the trees that were planted as part of this project. The second specialized volume, the Vance County Week of the Young Child scrapbook, chronicles the eponymous annual event during 1979-1986. Sponsored by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, the celebration was first established in 1971 and continues annually in April. Its purpose is to celebrate young children and teachers, families, and programs while affirming the importance of early childhood (defined as birth through age 8). The scrapbook contains photographs, newspaper clippings, and other memorabilia from the celebrations in Vance County.
To view all of the scrapbooks from Perry Memorial Library, click here.
Student yearbooks from schools in Henderson and Middleburg in Vance County, N.C., are now available online in the North Carolina High School Yearbooks collection on DigitalNC.
The yearbooks are from the collection of the Perry Memorial Library (Henderson, N.C.). They span the years 1924 through 1961 and come from three different schools:
These join yearbooks of the Henderson Institute that are already online, giving Vance County residents and researchers a terrific resource for community history and memory.
We have added issues of the Martin County Enterprise & Weekly Herald and the Bertie Ledger-Advance thanks to Martin Community College and the Bertie County Public Library. Coverage includes December 2019-December 2020 issues of the Enterprise & Weekly Herald and January 2022-November 2022 issues plus a special edition issue from March 15, 2000 of the Ledger-Advance.
The majority of newspapers on our site date from the early to mid-19th century, so we’re always interested in adding more recent issues when possible. In the Enterprise & Weekly Herald issues shared today you can read about the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and how a more rural county navigated national, state, and local regulations and concerns.
The issues of the Ledger-Advance cover a later date and talk about the lingering effects of COVID-19. The last issue in this batch mentions Bertie County’s Tricentennial celebrations in November 2022. Bertie County, originally part of Chowan County, was one of the first formed in the state as larger counties were split into smaller portions. Also included in this batch is a special edition from March 15, 2000 that offers reflections on recovery from Hurricane Floyd.
With the start of the fall semester and football season here in North Carolina, marching bands are officially back on the field and in the stands supporting their teams and entertaining audiences with favorites such as Fight Song, Hey Baby, and You Can Call Me Al. While we all appreciate what marching bands adds to these sporting events, no school has shown as much appreciation for their marching band than Henderson High School.
In the school’s 1964 yearbook, an overwhelming amount of page space is given to the school’s band. Some of these photographs show the students rehearsing in the band room with band director W. T. Hearne, but a majority of them show the students in their full marching band and majorette uniforms. The photographs included in this post from the 1964 Pep Pac showcase the amazing size of their band as well as their snazzy uniforms.
To learn more about the Granville County Public Library, visit their website here.
Through our partnership with the Bertie County Public Library and Martin Community College, we now have many more editions of the Bertie Ledger-Advance. This batch of the Windsor, N.C., paper ranges from January 2016 until December 2021, meaning that it covers many of the major news stories still in memory.
March 11, 2020
Perhaps one of the most obvious topics that appears in these issues is the impact of Covid-19 in one of North Carolina’s small towns. The front-page coverage starts where you might expect: March 11, 2020.
Initial articles focus on preparedness; the March 18, 2020 issue announces Governor Roy Cooper’s mandate to close schools for two weeks and end gatherings of more 50 people. That was also the week that Bertie County declared a State of Emergency in order to receive resources for public health measures.
“The fact that we are so rural here in Bertie County gives us an edge. …We are not like Raleigh as it relates to populations,” Bertie County Emergency Services Director Mitch Cooper said.
Bertie County begins holding church services outdoors (March 25, 2020)
These issues go on to document the progression of the pandemic in a rural area. On March 25, 2020, Bertie County sees its first confirmed case; the state begins “Phase 1” re-opening on May 10, 2020; Bertie and surrounding counties experience spikes in the number of cases, including one from September 10, 2020. At the end of 2020, the paper also published a recap of the year’s major stories, noting that the “Pandemic dominated headlines.”
The coverage continues through 2021, when schools are finally scheduled to reopen for in-person learning in March 2022. Through each of these stories, its clear what a huge impact Covid-19 had on the lives of Bertie County residents—as it did for people across the state, the nation, and the world.
March 25, 2020
To see more news stories from this batch, you can browse by date:
Thanks to our partner, Granville County Public Library, a batch containing yearbooks from Dabney High School, Henderson High School, Franklinton High School, J.F. Webb High School, and Zeb Vance High School ranging from 1938 to 1970 are now available on our website.
To learn more about the Granville County Public Library, please visit their website.
For more yearbooks from across North Carolina, visit our yearbook collection.
This holiday season join us here on the blog for the 12 Days of NCDHC. We’ll be posting short entries that reveal something you may not know about us. You can view all of the posts together by clicking on the 12daysofncdhc tag. And, as always, chat with us if you have questions or want to work with us on something new. Happy Holidays!
Day 2: Newspapers Advanced Search
We’re adding more newspapers on an almost weekly basis, and the collection currently holds over 1.2 million pages. With so much text, searches can be a lot more successful if you use the Newspapers Advanced Search where you can do multiple kinds of searches:
Any of the words – example: the words Barry OR Allen somewhere on the page
All of the words – example: the words Barry AND Allen somewhere on the page
Phrase search – example: Barry Allen right next to each other
Proximity search – example: the words Barry and Allen when they are within 5 (or 10, or 50, or 100) words of each other
In addition to these choices for what you’re searching on, you can narrow down your search in the following ways:
by year
by type (our newspaper titles are currently categorized as community papers, student papers, and African-American papers)
by county
by title(s)
There are a couple of ways to get to the Newspapers Advanced Search but the fastest is to either bookmark the link or to go to the Newspapers landing page and click the link in the upper right.
The Advanced Search is a great way to find someone by name, or to search through all of the newspapers we have on DigitalNC from a particular county. We recommend it all the time when a regular keyword search isn’t doing the trick.
Check back on Tuesday as we reveal Day 3 of the 12 Days of NCDHC!
A birds eye view of Goldsboro High School, taken in 1968.
A new batch of yearbooks from Wayne County are now available on DigitalNC, courtesy of our partner, Wayne County Public Library. In this collection are over half a dozen yearbooks from the 1950s and 1960s from across Wayne County, including the city of Goldsboro and the towns of Dudley and Pikeville.
These yearbooks include individual portraits, class portraits, and more. They also include photographs of activities, student clubs, and the schools’ sports teams. These yearbooks highlight different parts of the student bodies, including the history clubs, the technical students, the students involved in foreign language classes, honor societies, and more.
A photo of students at Southern Wayne High School in 1968.
Follow the links below to browse the yearbooks from the schools included in this batch:
Senior supplements published in the early 1940s are also now online, which can be seen here.
These yearbooks give us fascinating insights into what life was like for high school students in Wayne County in the mid-20th century. To see more from our partner who provided these yearbooks, visit Wayne County Public Library’s partner page, or take a look at their website.
This blog is maintained by the staff of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center and features the latest news and highlights from the collections at DigitalNC, an online library of primary sources from organizations across North Carolina.
