Over the past six months, Atlanta History Center has received over 900 of your most intimate, heartwarming, heartbreaking, funny, and unpredictable pandemic moments.
Thank you for trusting us to preserve these moments in history.
StorCorps Connect
Since we last checked in back in July, we’ve developed a unique partnership with StoryCorps in order to better connect our community during this time of social distancing. To accomplish this goal, we’ve set up a StoryCorps Community page and are calling on you to record virtual conversations with your friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors through StoryCorps Connect or StoryCorps Virtual Signature Interview. While we understand that the difficult times in which we are living will take people a long time to process, we want to help preserve the current hopes, fears, challenges, and joys that we are experiencing right now. By sharing your stories, you help you actively create the historical record for future generations—from the outbreak of the virus, sweeping changes to work/life balance, and increased social justice work with the Black Lives Matter Movement. It is our hope that you and yours will come back and record your story during this time of immense uncertainty and change.
Making history behind the scenes
This oral history initiative is not the only project that we’ve been working on! There’s been a lot of work behind the scenes at Atlanta History Center’s Kenan Research Center to prepare the images, documents, videos, and physical items you shared with us—thank you!—for the collection.
The first step in processing the submissions is to create an inventory of the items and add metadata (search terms) to the submitted records, which helps to increase their findability once they are published. Once the inventory process is complete, our archivists will write a finding aid (an inventory created using the earlier search terms) and will add digital copies of the items to our online visual database, Album. We plan to have this work completed no later than June 2021.
We want to keep hearing from you! We will continue to keep the submissions page open throughout this process, and hope that you will continue to send us your historic moments.
We would like to especially urge teachers and students to submit content about how you are adapting to the mixed learning activities, how you and your pod have made a new normal, and how you have navigated taking a corona-cation. We’d also love to hear from you if you are working the polls, census taking, or doing social justice work.
Submissions spotlight
Jennifer Liu
Jennifer Liu recently submitted a few images of a visit to a local fountain with her children. She shared, “While this visit was nothing like our previous visits we’d been so used to taking, to my three-year-old it was the same place and brought a sense of normalcy. I still don’t know what wishes my son made at the fountain but hope they all come true. As for my wish, so far, it’s remained true. I hope that doesn’t change…”
How have you been looking for ways to create a new normal?
Rob Stoll
Rob Stoll sent in this video covering the group that he’s been working with to make and donate masks to his local fire station, nursing home, and hospitals. Stories of folks coming together to donate their talents, time, and supplies are some of our most heartwarming submissions.
Have you found a way to give back to your community? What kind of mask do you prefer and why?
Tresha Glenister
Tresha Glenister submitted a series entitled “Disposable” which she describes as “Disposable. Vulnerable. Adaptable. These are the words that ran through my mind on my newly adopted routine walks covering 115 miles in the spring of 2020. These walks offered structure and purpose where I attempted to focus entirely on my natural surroundings to drown out the fear and dread detailed by every news outlet.”
What have you been doing to reset and recharge?
Ready to share your story? Use our Atlanta Corona Collective form to get in touch.
As always, thank you for trusting us with your historic moments, and we hope to hear from you soon.
Stay well, ATL.