2020 Internship Blog Post #4

This week, at UCF Special Collections and University Archives, I finished up working on the binder from last week which had a large portion of legal documents, including various deeds and indentures. It was very interesting to go through this type of documents since I have never looked at deeds or indentures before and it gave me a new outlook on this collection and the various documents in it. These documents made me wonder if these legal documents are the same elsewhere in the United States in terms of how they look, since I have never seen documents like these before. I believe I have also forgotten to mention previously that all of these documents are copies of the originals. I also found something exceedingly interesting in the collection – an (as far as I can see) unpublished manuscript which now has its own folder in the collection. Once I rehouse the rest of the collection that remains in binders I would like to go back to this manuscript and look through it in more detail. I would also like to show this manuscript to my internship and thesis advisor, Dr. French, when he comes to look at what I have done for my final for the internship because I think it could be important. It was quite time- consuming to get through this binder because it was one of the largest in the collection. I have been trying to get through the larger binders now before the smaller ones because I know they will take me longer to get through because of how many documents are in them, having to check all of the dates, and checking for duplicates. Many of the binders were not put in archival clear sleeves to keep the documents safe, so I have to take them out and also remove staples and paperclips. I really enjoy doing these things, however, as I get deeper and deeper into the collection the amount of duplicates grows.
            The duplicates primarily come from the large amount of census data in this collection. In the collection there are so far about five folders of census data from Eatonville, Apopka, and Ocoee. Every time a new binder with more census data comes up, I go back into those folders to check for duplicates, many of them with very small changes to the forms or to the data that was highlighted. In this instance, what is important to keep? So I have to ask a lot of questions so I get a better understanding. I really want to do this collection the justice it deserves and reflect the best I possibly can on Special Collections and the University Archives and create the best finding aid I can.
With the following binder, most of the contents have been census data with cover sheets for this portion saying Ocoee, however, that being said, it actually switches between Ocoee and Apopka and my supervisor looked and found a few instances of general Orange county data. The binder as a whole was labeled Apopka and Ocoee but the census data was only label Ocoee so it was slightly confusing and it switches between these cities and the county because it is based off of alphabetical order. It is also important to note that these people that are appearing in the census data were perhaps living in many different places in Florida and that is why they are appearing in many different censuses, as well as perhaps living in other places in the United States before or after living in Florida. I talked to my supervisor about this and we decided to come back to this binder with the census data after I have finished looking through and rehousing the rest of the collection since there are many duplicates and it is time-consuming. In the previous section in this binder which had a cover sheet labeled Apopka there were many interesting things including land plans, such as an actual photo of an original land plan which I put into an archival clear sleeve to keep it safe. I also found a transparency, to be viewed on a projector, of a land plan which I also put in an archival clear sleeve. I am really trying to pick up the pace while doing a quality job.

The University of Central Florida Special Collections and University Archives Website:

https://library.ucf.edu/about/departments/special-collections-university-archives/



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