I have history on the brain. Bear with me.
Such a state is partly due to my reading, finally, of the novel “Austerlitz,” by W.G. Sebald. It’s a beautiful book for its discourses on time and all that is lost to it and waiting to be rediscovered.
Memory animates history. Now that I have finished my project on Sun Valley present, past and possible futures, my e-mail box is filled with the reminiscences of people who once delivered the neighborhood’s newspapers or drove its children to catechism, who climbed into tires and rolled down the hill from Federal Boulevard.
I’m always fascinated by the way in which a neighborhood’s many selves are layered upon one another. The previous incarnation is never gone as long as someone remembers the twilight games of hide ‘n’ seek or how chilly the morning was when the bulldozers tore through the Las Casitas housing projects.
Which leads to a discovery I wanted to pass along.
About three years ago, the Denver Public Library’s Western history/genealogy section won a grant to begin telling the histories of city neighborhoods online. It started with Auraria, Barnum, Capitol Hill, Five Points, Park Hill, University Park and West Colfax.
The task required archivist Jamie Seemiller, the program administrator, and her staff to sort through tens of thousands of records — photos, handwritten letters, brochures, maps, directories, anything that might illuminate the stories. More than 86,000 records now make up the Creating Communities website at creatingcommunities .
The site, beautifully done, recently went live. A few kinks remain, but you can read about these particular neighborhoods and research larger databases of photos, householder directories, maps and tax assessor records from 1860 to 1950.
I’ve played around on it. It’s how I know Mr. and Mrs. Reddish lived in my house in 1924 and were gone by 1937. For those for whom the feel and smell of old paper can never be replaced or who doubt the integrity of the migration between tactile and digital, the information is still to be had in the central library just south of downtown, fifth floor.
This website took two years to create, but is just the beginning of the Creating Communities project. About a year ago, Seemiller and a couple of her colleagues were on a walking tour of the West Colfax neighborhood where they encountered a woman who told them her grandmother was Nettie Moore, a local icon. The woman had a scrapbook filled with information.
“I had no idea who Nettie Moore was,” Seemiller tells me. “We realized there were so many untold stories out there.”
And the library wants them for its database. You can upload historical photos and family research now on the myDenver page of Creating Communities, but what Seemiller and her colleagues will be working on over the next two years is more ambitious and revolutionary. They will partner with other groups to teach people how to tell their stories, scan their information and upload it or, because a digital divide does exist, do it for them.
“Creating Communities is very traditional right now in that we tell the story,” Seemiller says. “I literally went though thousands of records, and I picked the material you see. It’s a very top-down approach, but there’s a lot we don’t have, we don’t know, we aren’t the experts on. So, we’re working on a bottom-up approach. I want you to tell me your stories.”
This is a search for people and history that rarely made its way to a library shelf or a historian’s ear.
If it works, what begins is a conversation that connects people to places and past to present. If it works, what results is the flinging open of countless windows to a city still undiscovered.
Tina Griego writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
