Oberlin Heritage Center Blog

This is Kelsey Voit’s first blog post.

Hello everyone! My name is Kelsey Voit and I am a volunteer at OHC. I have lived in northeast Ohio all my life and have always had a deep interest in history. I like to poke fun of the fact that I live in Elyria now, since Oberlin was founded because Elyria was considered a den of sin in the 1830s. In 2012 I graduated from Ohio University with a BA in Political Science and History. Currently I am a student at Kent State University working towards a Masters degree in Museum Studies through their Library and Information Sciences program. For those of you who have read the blog, it is the same program as the great oral history transcriber, Melissa Clifford. I started volunteering at OHC back in March 2014 and have been enjoying every minute of it.

The reason you may not know I exist is because I am a basement dweller, which is more exciting than it sounds. Here in the basement of the Monroe house I am surrounded by objects, pictures, files, and people that I learn from every Wednesday I come in. And I have learned quite a bit! Learning about the history of Oberlin has become a great past time of mine and I look forward to eventually becoming a docent. A large part of my volunteer hours are spent on organizational projects that the staff of OHC simply does not have the time to get to. My first project here was preserving the museum’s pictorial history. What started out as a box of hundreds of loose photographs became an organized system of binders that told the story of OHC’s past. I should explain the process. I started this project by looking through the binders that the museum already had and just getting a feel for the pictures. These binders were organized by year and event. For example, in the 1990s the museum would put together an elaborate gingerbread house contest and this event is represented throughout the binders. After I took a look at the pictures in the binders I started organizing the loose pictures by year. This was either found by the developed date on the back of the pictures, comparing the pictures with those already in the binders, or using context clues from the content of the picture. After they were grouped by year they were organized by event. When placed in the binder it would look like a calendar that the viewer could navigate through by event (events from January in the front, December in the back etc.) After that was all said and done then the fun part began. I started to digitize photographs that were pertinent to the historical preservation of the museum itself. This means good quality photographs of people at museum-sponsored events.

This was a perfect project for me because I really did not know much about OHC when I started volunteering. Through the photo project I learned not only the events that have shaped this organization, but I learned about the people who were contributing and leading those events. I have scanned in pictures of old board meetings, of the Little Red Schoolhouse being moved to where it sits now, living history tours, parades, family fun fairs, annual meetings, and renovation projects. I had the privilege to see how the organization was born, how it changed, and the steps that were taken to make it what we see today. I had the honor of getting to know some of the people that were not only involved with OHC but truly loved it. Some of them are no longer with us and I wish I could have met them because they seem like real characters. I feel I got to know those who I was scanning in on some level because I could eventually see a picture of a large table of people from an annual meeting and pick out those I have seen before. This project did make meeting some people a little awkward because I would lead with, “Nice to finally meet you. I have scanned so many pictures of you!” Not the best way to meet someone.