Pandemic history in real time. Lexington History Museum wants your COVID-19 memories.
Did you take a picture of Kroger’s empty shelves? Write a letter to a grandmother isolated in a nursing home? Kept a quarantine diary?
If so, the Lexington History Museum would like a copy for their new Lexington Pandemic History Project.
“We’ve been focused so much on exhibits and curating that it snuck up on me that we need to be collecting,” said Foster Ockerman, Jr., the museum’s director. “Our mission is to tell Lexington’s story of everyone and in every way, and to do that, you have to collect it at the personal level. When it comes time to write the history we’ll have it.”
Ockerman was contacted by one woman who said she couldn’t participate because she was stuck in Texas and couldn’t get home, so he told her to send a narrative about that far away quarantine. Others have sent in pictures from grocery stores, or the creative projects their children have worked on while out of school. Someone else sent in a story about losing a grandparent they couldn’t visit because of nursing home isolation.
COVID-19 has so upended every facet of every day life around the world that it’s one of those rare times when we recognize that stunning history is being made every day, at a time when we obsessively document even the most humdrum aspects of it.
A few weeks ago, when writing a story about the Spanish flu of 1918, I noticed a real dearth of material about what had happened in Lexington during that time, as opposed to numerous accounts from Louisville and around the state. Historians of the 2020 coronavirus outbreak will have the opposite problem, but it’s a good one, said Doug Boyd, director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky.
In the old days, “historians got what was left to them, what survived, like the fragments of a clay pot, or the official records of those in power,” Boyd said. “This way historians will have a more balanced view.”
UK’s Special Collections are working on their own pandemic project, which they will unveil in a few weeks, but it will focus largely on UK and the state. The Lexington History Museum will focus solely on Lexington and Fayette County. Other projects are starting up as well, from the University of Louisville Special Collections to StoryCorps, which created StoryCorps Connect, which uses remote video conferencec technology to interview people far away. StoryCorps interviews, those Friday morning radio talks that make you cry in your car, are archived in the Library of Congress.
Will the sheer amount of digital archives that will result from this singular moment in time hinder rather than help future historians? Boyd made an interesting point: Take a 19th-century photo of a couple standing in front of their farmhouse, a la American Gothic, that was taken to document those two people. But historians today now use that photo to discern the materials of the house, the crops in the field beyond and the kinds of clothes they were wearing, rather than focusing on the people.
“We don’t know what’s going to be important or useful to the future,” he said, “so trying to preserve and document is important, even if it’s somewhat random and miscellaneous. In piecing together the parts and drawing conclusions, even the hodge-podge is important.”
Ockerman made much the same point.
“We’re collecting the dots so someone else can connect them,” he said.
If you want to send your coronavirus memory or artifact to the Lexington History Museum, Ockerman said the best way is by email to info@lexhistory.org with a subject line of VIRUS. If you want to send a physical object, you can mail it to the Lexington History Museum at P.O. Box 748, Lexington, Ky. 40588.
