Preserving history
The Vestavia Hills Historical Society has a lot of important pieces of the city’s history: a picture of the first family to settle here, documents from the creation of the school system and the cane of former Mayor George Ward. But most of those historic items are disorganized and kept in a locked storage room in the Library in the Forest.
Shelia Bruce, a 35-year member of the Vestavia Hills Historical Society, said the society began an effort to properly categorize and archive the materials they have collected in 2010, when they relocated to the newly opened library.
This spring, they hope to bring in interns from Birmingham-Southern College to help complete their archiving work and make it accessible to the public online.
Bruce said their collection includes artifacts, copies of important documents, scrapbooks and photos of important people, places and events. However, there were also boxes of photographs that had been donated to the society with no names, dates or other information.
“Some people will just hand us pictures, that are great pictures, great historical stuff, but no dates, no identification or anything,” she said.
That has led to days where society members and prominent community leaders — including former mayors, council members and PTO members — have sat down together in the library, painstakingly sorting photos looking for anything they recognize.
“We have to just call a meeting,” Bruce said. “We try to just do nothing but identify photographs.”
As the historical society’s collection has grown, Bruce said they have realized their limitations. The physical storage space they have at the library is too small to continually add more hard-copy documents. It’s also inconvenient when someone wants a copy of a photo or document, as they have to schedule an appointment with a society member to get access to their archives.
“We understand that people do want to look at these photos,” Bruce said.
Bruce is working with Birmingham-Southern College to create an internship that will hopefully help address both of these problems. She said the first interns, once chosen, will pick up the archiving work that a former Birmingham Public Library archivist helped the society start, so that photos and documents are properly identified, labeled and stored to be preserved over time.
The interns will also help create a website and upload copies of the society’s collection there, for the public to view and purchase photos if they are interested. Bruce said the process will be similar to the Birmingham Public Library’s public archives access.
Transitioning from hard copies to digital copies will be a big undertaking, but Bruce said it will be beneficial for Vestavia Hills residents who want to learn more about their city. They will also store copies of everything on a cloud-based server as a backup, should anything ever happen to the physical copies.
Once this is done, Bruce said future interns will help maintain the website and archive new photos and documents from ongoing historic events.
“Some people say, ‘Well we didn’t even know we had a historical society,’” Bruce said. “When you later on say, ‘Oh, I remember when the city hall was here and here,’ somebody will say, ‘Who has a recordof that?’ or ‘Who has pictures of that?’We do.”
The Vestavia Hills Historical Society meets in January, April and October on the third Monday of the month, at 2 p.m. at the Library in the Forest. The April meeting will include a field trip to visit the Pizitz Building and take a tour of historic downtown locations. Find the historical society on Facebook to keep up with news and events.