For the past week I have been continuing to work on the COVID-19 stories from Lackawanna county. As I mentioned in my last post, this project reminds me a lot of the current project that our public history class has been working on this semester.

For this project, we are looking for community members to contribute to the collection on COVID-19. Contributions such as stories, photos, videos, social media posts, newspaper articles, artwork, and digital/physical objects. These contributions will be put into a collection in the Sister Mary Carmel McGarigle University Archives at Misericordia to document the time that we are living in right now.

As I’ve said in previous posts, it is very important to be documenting our lives at this time. 100 years from now, people will be studying 2020 and will wonder exactly what we did during the pandemic. Did we spend more time with our families? Take up new hobbies? Learn something new? These are the kind of things to consider if you would like to make a contribution.

Personally, once everything shut down in March, I tried learning multiple new hobbies like knitting, sewing, and hand-stitched embroidery. I also took that time to read some new books that I had bought but never had the time to read. While these small events may seem trivial to us now, they will be important to know for those in the future. If you would like to contribute to this collection, go to https://mulocalhistoryprojects.org/pandemic-histories/ for more information!