By Myla Wasser
My understanding of archives has been shaped by two specific classes in my undergraduate term. As one of my majors is history, I took a practicum and a seminar.
Both classes focused on the process of doing historical research, leading students to Smathers Library to explore the archives. After my practicum concluded, I decided to look into working in the archives, as I was curious about the research process and what went on behind the scenes. In summer 2024, I began a thirteen-week internship in Special Collections, working with James Cusick, curator for the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History, and Bridget Bihm-Manuel, the coordinator for Florida history.
I worked on six collections during my time as an intern – the James Edmundson Ingraham Collection, the Kathy Freeperson Collection, the Florida LGBTQ Collection, the John M. Goggin Collection, the Louis Bishop Capron Collection, and the Albert DeVane Collection. The work varied immensely. For the Ingraham Collection, I organized a recent donation of additional materials. I had to read through all the documents, figure out who they were written by, what purpose they served, and when they were written before starting to arrange them. I input all the new contents into Archive Space and rewrote the finding guide for the collection.
My work on the Kathy Freeperson Collection was almost exactly the same, except this was a new collection, and I created the guide. Freeperson lived for several years in Tampa, helping to found Tampa NOW, STOP RAPE, and the Tampa Feminist Guerrilla Theatre. She spent 10 years at the theater, where she wrote, directed, and produced plays. She also helped set up the State of Florida’s first anti-rape, anti-assault services in the Tampa Women’s Center. My guide to her papers can be seen at https://findingaids.uflib.ufl.edu/repositories/2/resources/1884. Upon completing this work, I also helped reorganize the Florida LGBTQ Collection to include a major new donation of materials from the Stonewall Museum and Archive in Fort Lauderdale.
My major summer project involved the other three collections. During my undergraduate years, I have become increasingly interested in the struggles that Indigenous peoples face. What started as an academic interest has become more important since beginning to understand indigenous rights movements and how those in a settler society are at best complicit in the harm these communities face. During my seminar on Black Abolitionism, I researched how different newspapers discussed the Second Seminole War. Dr. Cusick proposed that I might like to work with the Goggin, DeVane, and Capron collections. These collections all had folders full of photographs relating to life among the Seminole and Mikosukee tribes.
After reading a number of books for background, I went through the collections and made an Excel spreadsheet with the names of everyone who had already been identified in photographs. I also listed the dates written on photographs when applicable. Once I had a person identified, I could find and identify them in other photographs. I even found that the different collections had similar, if not the same, photographs.
For example, a photograph that appears once in the Goggin Collection appears twice in the DeVane Collection. The next step was to look through the folders and try to recognize and identify people I had seen before. This step was the most difficult, as it can be quite hard to tell if one person appears elsewhere, or if it is someone who may be related to them. For example, while I could identify that Iona Osceola Billie and Ruby Osceola Billie appeared in multiple photographs, I struggled to identify which one of them appeared in a photograph with only one of them. I also used online resources, such as Florida Memory, to find any additional information on certain people. I was able to find out that Sam Tommie had a son named Howard who had been photographed twice across all three collections.
I also met with historian and author Patsy West, who has published several books on the Seminole and Mikosukee and has an extensive photograph collection about them. West was raised alongside the Mikosukee in Ft. Lauderdale and knew many of the people in the photographs. One of her books, The Seminole and Miccosukee Tribes of Southern Florida (2002), a book of photographs, was immensely useful during this process. West allowed me to look through her collection, which helped with making identifications. She also provided a copy of the 1914 Reconstructed Seminole Census. This document helped identify at least twenty individuals in photographs, as well as providing clan affiliation information for many others.
As a result of my work, there are now 121 folders with identifications across the three collections and 365 individuals identified. This was an incredibly enjoyable experience, and I hope that my work will be useful for others down the line.
See the Name Index (Word and Excel Formats)