Untouched History

I just found out how awesome the Internet has made history today. I’ve always been interested in past, but most of all my family’s past. It’s probably because my grandma has always been willing to share her history with me. Teachers can tell you a million times to learn from your family’s history while your relatives are still alive, but you don’t know how right they are until you actually talk to someone in your family. Strangely enough the Internet brought this realization back to me.

            I’m doing a project in English about the Louis Smith Tainter House, which used to be a women’s dormitory called Eichelberger Hall. While doing research in the archives I given copies of black and white pictures, letters, brochures, and articles that I was suppose to piece together and turn it into the buildings background information. I love that kind of research. It’s like nobody has touched the material yet and nobody knows the great information that is hidden inside of it. Also, nobody has ruined it with their take on it, and it’s just left to be taken in as it is. I also love that the people inside the pictures don’t even know that someone in the future is going to look at them as part of history. My grandparents have shown me their yearbooks, letters from a friend of theirs that died in Vietnam, their old catalogs, and pictures and passports of my ancestors who were the first people in the family to move to America. It’s amazing how much these things revealed about the people I knew and the people I never knew existed.

I looked at the Eichelberger pictures and remembered that my grandma said that my grandpa’s sister went to Stout. I’m still trying to figure out if she ever lived in Eichelberger Hall, but as I was searching the school’s website in the archives section I found pictures of her and her husband in the UW-Stout Tower Yearbook. I couldn’t find out were she lived, but I thought it was pretty cool that I could see that she was in a Home Economics Club and I found a picture of her husband playing pool. My mother told me that she became a Home Economic teacher and he was always a big pool player. I couldn’t piece that last bit of information together without some help, but everything else sparked my interest, and finding this information on my own was so much fun. 

All of this information was in one easy to access place online. For once in my life I could find information about my family history on my own. I couldn’t get the detailed information that my grandparents could give me, but I could find information I didn’t have before. I have technology to thank for making me feel more like a historian, and that’s why I’m starting to learn that I love it.

If you know someone who went to Stout any time from 1909-1918, 1920-1989 than check out this site http://ezproxy.lib.uwstout.edu/ics-wpd/Towers/index.shtml and see if you can find them.