Francis B. Hays Collection Volume 122, Women’s Clubs I, page 115
The latest batch of scrapbooks from the Francis B. Hays Collection at the Granville County Public Library are now available on DigitalNC. Volumes 116 – 125 include subjects relating to women’s and men’s clubs in Oxford, politics in North Carolina, and weather.
Four of the scrapbooks highlight clubs in the Granville County area. Women’s Clubs I and Women’s Clubs II document the activities of intellectual and service organizations, such as literary societies and girl scouting groups. Men’s Club I and Men’s Club II highlight a variety of fraternal and service organizations, like the Shriners and Lions Clubs. There is also information and clippings about the Masons, which can be researched in context with other materials on DigitalNC, like those from the Grand Lodge of North Carolina. All of the newspaper clippings and print materials in these scrapbooks are full-text searchable and could be useful for genealogy researchers.
Francis B. Hays Collection Volume 124, Weather I, page 165
Francis B. Hays Collection, Volume 124, Weather I, page 175
Additionally, the scrapbooks concerning weather might also be of interest. These scrapbooks contain state and national newspaper clippings about extreme whether incidents, especially during the 1940’s and 1950’s. The images above feature two weather extremes from the triangle area– deep snow in downtown Durham and swimsuit weather in Raleigh in January! Check out Weather I and Weather II for more images and stories like these.
To learn more about Francis B. Hays and the scrapbooks he created, browse the exhibit page. For more information about Granville County Public Library, visit the contributor page or the website.
Portrait of Marvin Tupper Jones organizing recovered materials from the Newsom Store.
Historically, Hertford County is home to people with Indigenous and African American backgrounds. The community has always been fairly small and like a lot of small farming communities in the South, Hertford County has seen lots of people move out of town and not return. However, there is still a community that is proud to live in Hertford County due to the natural beauty and rich history of the area.
Residents like Marvin Tupper Jones, are passionate about unearthing and preserving the legacies of former members in the surrounding tri-cities area of Hertford County. The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center had the privilege to partner with the Chowan Discovery Group and gain insight about the entrepreneurship of the Newsom and Hall families in Ahoskie. Willian David Newsom (1822-1916) is described as being a born-free North Carolinian who would later become a teacher, farmer and storekeeper. He was also once the largest landowner of the Winton Triangle community (Winton-Cofield-Ahoskie).After the passing of Newsom, his son-in-law, James Hall (1877-1932), took over the family store and also co-founded the Atlantic District Fairgrounds in Ahoskie. Physical remnants of the Newsom and Hall families are seen throughout these materials.
The Newsom family store in Hertford County, NC.
This batch also gives a look inside recordkeeping in the early 1900’s through invoices, checks and ledgers associated with the family general store family store. In spite of the family store’s current condition, at one point in time, people were shopping and congregating here; we have lots of receipts.
Over one hundred issues of the Orphans’ Friend newspaper from 1876 and 1877 are available online now. A publication of the Grand Lodge of Ancient, Free and Accepted Masons of North Carolina, Orphans’ Friend was distributed to children at the “Orphan Asylum,” or orphanage, in Oxford, North Carolina. The newspaper was established in 1875 and is still published by the Grand Lodge today. It was initially published to draw attention to childcare needs across North Carolina after the Civil War left many orphaned.
These issues are often mostly comprised of stories, recommendations and lessons, and frequently include news from around North Carolina.
To browse all issues of Orphans’ Friend on DigitalNC, click here. To learn more about the Grand Lodge of Ancient, Free and Accepted Masons of North Carolina, visit their partner page here or their website here. We are thankful for their partnership in making these newspapers available online.
Company H, WWI, 1st North Carolina Infantry of the National Guard, departed Waynesville’s train depot on June 26, 1916. They guarded the Mexican border and returned to Waynesville in February 1917. In July 1917 they then were sent to France during WWI. Courtesy of Haywood County Public Library.
Last Thursday, April 6, 2017, marked the 100th anniversary of the United States’ entry into World War I. Over the next year, many cultural heritage institutions around the country are highlighting the materials they hold related to the “Great War.” We wanted to highlight some of the fantastic local North Carolina materials we have digitized for our partners that document the World War I perspective from North Carolinians’ eyes.
Severalscrapbooks from Elon University detail the students’ view of the war as well as what college life during World War I looked like here in North Carolina.
Headline from Page 2 of the April 12, 1917 edition of the Roanoke News
The richest source of information on World War I and North Carolina on DigitalNC may very well be the many local newspapers we’ve digitized that contain the local perspective on the war, including some quite subdued headlines announcing the US’s entry. DigitalNC also hosts several World War I camp and hospital newspapers including the Trench and Camp from Camp Greene and the Caduceus, the paper of the Base Hospital at Camp Greene. Both are from Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.
To view more materials from World War I, check out a search of our collections here. And to learn more about World War I materials from across the state, visit the institutions highlighted in this blog post from our colleagues over at the State Archives of North Carolina.
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.
