This week Ethan and I worked on a project of cataloging oral histories from a local project by Professor Robert Wolensky.

The collection was of oral histories from locals, such as miners, families of miners, politicians, and union members. I was excited to catalog the collection because it gave me the chance to read through some of the oral histories, which is something that I have not had the opportunity to do very much before. I found interesting interviews with political activists, former miners, those who had family members die in mine disasters, and more.

Together Ethan and I went through the boxes and cataloged them, which took time because there were multiple boxes to go through, each filled with folders. The interviews were over decades; they went from the 60’s up until the early 2000’s.

This week we also began to prepare for an upcoming Iron Furnaces tour. Ethan and I will give a tour together to a small group, so we researched the Iron Furnaces and made a visit there to learn more about them. It was helpful to visit them beforehand so I could better visualize how they would have ran and what they would have looked like while they were in operation. It made reading about them more understandable and made me feel better prepared to give a tour. I was also excited that I will get to do some public facing work, as I have very limited experience in that field.