The Louisville Leader African-American community newspaper, published weekly in Louisville from 1917 to 1950, offers a perspective on local and national events not available in the mainstream media at the time. The newspaper\u27s columns highlighting community members’ life events and activities may be of great interest to social historians and genealogists

Howard, Rachel

English

University of Louisville

University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Faculty Scholarship Spring 2014 Old news - The Louisville Leader's genealogical gems. Rachel Howard University of Louisville, rachel.howard@louisville.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/faculty  Part of the Archival Science Commons, Genealogy Commons, and the Social History Commons Original Publication Information This was originally published in the "Genealogy Gems" column of Kentucky Libraries, volume 78, issue 2, in Spring 2014. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. For more information, please contact thinkir@louisville.edu. KENTUCKY LIBRARIES • VOLUME 78 • NUMBER 212hen the University of LouisvilleArchives and Special Collections decided todigitize its entire run of microfilmed LouisvilleLeader newspapers, and make the scans freelyavailable on its Digital Collections website(http://digital.library.louisville.edu), the news-paper’s value to genealogists was not at theforefront of our minds. This African-American community newspaper, publishedweekly in Louisville from 1917 to 1950,offered a perspective on local and nationalevents not available in the mainstream(white-run) media at the time, and we wantedto provide broader access to those stories.While the Leader’s coverage of such topics aspolitical campaigns, the Great Depression,World War II, the ongoing scourge of lynch-ing, and the inequity of segregated facilitieswill not disappoint researchers looking for theAfrican-American perspective on those top-ics, the newspaper’s weekly columns high-lighting community members’ life events andactivities may be of greater interest to socialhistorians and genealogists.In a history of the Louisville Leader publishedin the December 4, 1937 issue on the occa-sion of its 20th anniversary, Mrs. Patsy Sloannotes that there were two types of newspaperreaders: those who find their own lives inter-esting and those who find their own lives dull.She continues, “The Louisville Leader publish-es records of weddings, funerals, lodge meet-ings, oyster suppers, silver teas and such ‘smalltown’ news to satisfy the first type…”1Neither Mrs. Sloan nor founding publisher I.Willis Cole may have anticipated the poten-tial long-term interest in such small-townnews for genealogists pursuing traces of theirancestors and for researchers attempting toflesh out the details of daily life in particularcommunities and eras. The types of records inwhich community members’ names (and,often, addresses) are reported in the Leaderinclude listings of births, deaths, hospitaliza-tions, marriages, vacations, visits, and visitors;professional achievements; club, church, fra-ternal organization, business, and schoolactivities; and athletic and theatrical events.This rich vein of information often appearedin regular columns, the titles and location ofwhich varied somewhat throughout thepaper’s decades-long run but remained fairlypredictable. Society and Clubs, or some varia-tion of that heading, often dominated Pagetwo of the paper, with columns such as Births– Deaths – Marriages or Vital Statistics andPersonals. Religion and Education schedulesand news appeared alongside the society newsor on a separate page. Classified advertise-ments typically included “In Memoriam” and“Card of Thanks” messages from the familiesof deceased community members. Most issuesincluded two pages from “Correspondents” inother communities in Kentucky, southernIndiana, and sometimes further afield (such asClarksville, Tennessee and Northport,Alabama), documenting milestones andevents from those locations.Unfortunately, for many weeks of the Leader’s33-year run, this wealth of information is notavailable. Several months after the death of I.Willis Cole in March 1950 (an event thor-oughly chronicled in the newspaper’s pages),the Leader ceased publication, and back issuesstored in the Cole Publishing Building werebadly damaged by a fire in 1954. The Colefamily donated the surviving copies, some ofwhich were smoke, water, and fire-damaged,to Kentucky State University, who loanedthem to the University of Louisville Archivesand Records Center in 1978 for microfilmingbefore the acidic newsprint completely disin-GENEALOGY GEMS: OLD NEWS – THE LOUISVILLELEADER’S GENEALOGICAL GEMSBY RACHEL HOWARDDIGITAL INITIATIVES LIBRARIAN, UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE LIBRARIESD E P A R T M E N T  K E N T U C K Y L I B R A R Y A S S O C I A T I O NKENTUCKY LIBRARIES • VOLUME 78 • NUMBER 2GENEALOGYGEMSCONTINUED13tegrated. Thus we are missing the issue inJanuary 1942 that may have reported on thebirth of Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali); thewinter 1937 issues that may have documentedhow the African-American community faredduring the Ohio River flooding; and muchmore. Torn portions of issues we do have ren-der some stories incomplete or illegible.The University of Louisville’s microfilm copies(seven reels’ worth) were scanned in 2011, andfurther disappointment ensued when wenoticed that the poor condition of the micro-filmed pages affected the legibility of the textfor automated optical-character recognition(OCR). OCR is used to make digitized textssearchable. Where automation fails, though,human intervention can succeed. Using theScripto plug-in to the open-source Omekasoftware, we established a crowdsourcing ini-tiative to enlist the community’s assistance intranscribing articles. In February 2013, welaunched a website providing free onlineaccess to PDFs of the 898 extant issues at digital.library.louisville.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/leader, and solicited assistance withtheir transcription. Well over 5,000 have beentranscribed to date, but many remain, and it isour hope that those who use the site forgenealogical or historical research can con-tribute to the resource by transcribing. Eachperson’s contribution to making the text moresearchable will benefit future researchers. Infact, it was in selecting articles to be tran-scribed that we recognized the value of themore mundane news to genealogists. Somevolunteer transcribers avoid the articles ladenwith names, but others relish the opportunity;one frequent contributor has reported feelinglike she’s actually getting to know the peopleshe reads and types about.The Leader can be browsed by date orsearched by keyword (with the caveat, asnoted above, that the transcription of text isnot yet complete). While the search boxabove the graphic on the collection’s homepage works well for single-word searching, werecommend the Advanced Search interface(accessed via the link to the right of the box)for more finely tuned searches, includingexact phrases. Choose “Full text” from thedrop-down within Advanced Search to searchthe transcribed text. In either simple oradvanced search, the asterisk (*) can be usedto truncate a term; this is useful if, for exam-ple, you’re looking for someone with the firstname William who may have been listed as“Will.” Keep in mind that you should alsosearch under the first initial alone and underthe common abbreviation “Wm.”Once the search results come up, click on theissue and either look for the red asteriskunderneath the thumbnail image of the pageat right to determine which page the searchterm appeared on, or switch to the “Text” tab(above the larger image of the page) to navi-gate directly to the search term. Once yourinitial search has brought you to a particularissue, you can also refine your search termusing the Text Search box.Whether you are interested in a particularperson or family or more generally in localAfrican-American history from the first halfof the twentieth century, the Louisville Leadermay be well worth mining for gems.Rachel Howardrachel.howard@louisville.eduEDITOR’S NOTEAs noted in the firstGenealogy Gems column(Kentucky Libraries 74.4),this space is devoted tothe subject of genealogy,and we welcome submis-sions on any related topic.Please see that first col-umn for a list of special-ized topics which we planto cover. No column inthis series is meant to be acomprehensive look at thespecific subject discussed.Submitted manuscriptswill be edited by theKentucky Libraries editorialboard.Please direct questions orsubmissions to KatherinePennavaria, column editor,at k.pennavaria@wku.eduFOOTNOTE1 Accessible at http://digital.library.louisville.edu/cdm/ref/collection/leader/id/7233

Old news - The Louisville Leader\u27s genealogical gems.

https://ir.library.louisville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&amp;context=faculty

Old news - The Louisville Leader\u27s genealogical gems.

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