Michigan Historical Records Survey

Records survey of the U.S. Work Projects Administration.

From the description of Michigan Historical Records Survey records, 1936-1942. (University of Michigan). WorldCat record id: 34422531

The Historical Records Survey (H.R.S.) was sponsored by the Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.)(known as the Work Projects Administration as of July 1, 1939) from 1935 to 1942. The purpose of the survey was to make unpublished government records and important privately-owned historical materials accessible to government officials, historians, legal scholars, and the general public. It was the largest survey of public records ever conducted in the United States. Luther Evans, the organizer of the Historical Records Survey, stated to a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor, on March 1, 1938, that the Survey's aim was to "build up a second library system in the nation, by making unpublished materials as widely known and readily available...as printed materials now are." He envisioned the H.R.S. being an important part of a "historical renaissance" in the United States and said, "American life will indeed achieve more dignity and richness as we study our past in the only way that it can be studied, that is, in the archives and other materials which the Historical Records Survey makes adequately accessible to us for the first time."

These lofty goals notwithstanding, in actual fact the Historical Records Survey was a Depression-era project to give jobs to unemployed white-collar workers - teachers, historians, clericals, and others - and, again in the words of Luther Evans, to "rehabilitate them, strengthen their moral fiber, give them renewed hope for the future." The projects upon which these people labored are described herein, followed by a description of the records themselves.

Although the Historical Records Survey was terminated before all the work that had been envisioned could be completed, what had been accomplished was significant. The program of the H.R.S. was quite broad, encompassing Federal Projects and State Projects. Federal Projects, sponsored and supervised by the H.R.S. at the national level from Washington D.C., included the Survey of Federal Archives (located in the states), Survey of County Records, Survey of Church Records, Manuscripts Survey, American Imprints Survey, Inventory of State Records, Inventory of Municipal Records, American Portraits Survey, Civilian Organizations Survey, Historical Buildings Survey, Maps Survey, Microfilm Survey of Public Records, Naturalization Records Survey, Newspapers Survey, Paintings and Statuaries Survey, Photographs Survey, School Records Survey, Emergency Disposition of Records Survey, and Vital Statistics Survey. State Projects included indexes (of newspapers, deeds, etc.), calendars of manuscript collections, subject-related surveys (e.g., in Michigan, the Inventory of Negro Manuscripts), and transcriptions of government and church records, especially vital statistics and county board of supervisors' minutes.

The Historical Records Survey was organized by Luther Evans toward the end of 1935. He served as its national director for about four years, until he became the director of the Library of Congress's Legislative Services Division. In 1940 he was succeeded by Sargent Child, who had been a field supervisor since the project's beginning. In Michigan the Survey began in 1936, directed by Assistant State Supervisor Dr. Milo Quaife, secretary and editor of the Detroit Public Library's Burton Historical Collection, and by Associate Supervisor William Jabine. Dr. Quaife retired from the Survey at the end of 1936 and Mr. Jabine became state director until 1939, when he was succeeded by Stuart Portner, who stayed on until the Historical Records Survey came to its premature end in 1942.

After Federal Project No. 1, of which the H.R.S. was one unit, lost its federal funding in 1939, the Historical Records Survey functioned as a nationwide series of locally-sponsored projects. In Michigan it was sponsored by the State Administrative Board, although the Federal government shared expenses.

The largest H.R.S. project in Michigan was the Survey of County Records, part of the W.P.A.'s Division of Professional and Service Projects. Field workers inventoried the public records of the counties by locating, describing, and classifying them for future ease of accessibility. In addition they compiled histories of the counties and descriptions of the organization and function of government units. These were to be published, together with the inventories, as guides for each of the 83 counties in Michigan. Although work was done on each county, only a dozen guides were ever published. All of the H.R.S. publications and most of the unpublished materials are housed in the Michigan Historical Collections, located at the Bentley Historical Library. Some other unpublished materials are at the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public Library (see a listing of their holdings in Appendix III of this finding aid).

The Manuscripts Survey was another important H.R.S. project. Margaret Sherburne was in charge on the national level and Dr. Bernhard Uhlendorf directed the Michigan survey. In 1940 the University of Michigan's Michigan Historical Collections became a cosponsor with the State Administrative Board for the statewide manuscripts survey and for the church records survey, both of whose publications are housed at the Bentley. A Guide to Manuscript Depositories in Michigan, published in 1940, was the first product of the Manuscripts Survey. The guide was produced under the auspices of the W.P.A.'s Division of Professional and Service Projects and included descriptions of the state's libraries, museums, and historical societies and their holdings. The inventory upon which the guide was based was a cooperative effort between Survey staff and the state's librarians and curators. Next came the Guide to Manuscript Collections in Michigan, prepared under the auspices of the W.P.A.'s Division of Community Service Programs (formerly the Division of Professional and Service Projects). Volume 1, an inventory of the Michigan Historical Collections, was issued in 1941 and Volume 2, an inventory of other University of Michigan collections, appeared in 1942. Calendars of two significant collections were published (filed under Historical Records Survey in the library's catalog of printed materials): Calendar of the Baptist Collection of Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, Michigan and Calendar of the John C. Dancy Correspondence, 1898-1910 (these are also held by the Library of Michigan and by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - see Appendices II and IV. They also have Vol. 1 of the Guide to Manuscript Collections in Michigan.). Many other private collections never got beyond the inventory stage, but these inventories are also in the H.R.S. collection at the Bentley.

A significant subject-related manuscript survey was the Inventory of Negro Manuscripts, the brainchild of Dr. Carter G. Woodson. The project was sometimes called the Negro Manuscripts Survey or, in Loretta Heffner's The WPA Historical Records Survey: A Guide to the Unpublished Inventories, Indexes, and Transcripts (Chicago: The Society of American Archivists, 1980), the Survey of Negro Historical Papers. In Michigan it was compiled by the Negro Manuscripts Unit of the Michigan H.R.S. as part of the W.P.A.'s Division of Community Service Programs. Under the direction of Dr. Bernhard Uhlendorf, director of the Manuscripts Survey, the project was organized by Christopher Alston in 1939 and run, after Mr. Alston moved on to other tasks, by historian Robert Hayden. The field workers (all Black) surveyed the Black community in the Detroit metropolitan area and the collections of the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public Library. They searched for original records and papers, both of organizations and of individuals, which would shed light on the social and political history of Blacks in America. In 1941, the Survey published the Calendar of the John C. Dancey Correspondence, 1898-1910. Two other Survey products went unpublished: an essay on Black history in Michigan, attributed to Robert Hayden by Mr. Alston, and a calendar of correspondence discovered in the survey. Copies of the essay and calendar were bound into one volume entitled History of the Negro in Michigan, which is in the Bentley Historical Library, along with the published Dancey calendar and all the unpublished material. Other material relating to Black history can be found in some of the county files, especially Cass County.

The work of the American Imprints Survey was to document the history of American printing. It was compiled from a survey of thousands of libraries in the U.S., as well as some private collections and historical societies. The survey aimed to list, on a state-by-state basis, all old publications in the United States: books, pamphlets, and broadsides. "Old" meant anything from the beginning of printing through 1876, when copyrighting was introduced (later, for the western states). The Michigan Imprints Survey published Preliminary Check List of Michigan Imprints, 1796-1850 in 1942 under the auspices of the W.P.A.'s Division of Community Service Programs. It is arranged chronologically by year of publication and includes for each Michigan publication a listing of author, title, place of publication, pagination, and locations anywhere in the United States as of the time the survey was conducted. The information gathered was cleared through the National Union Catalog and revealed the existence of many publications which had previously been unknown. Bibliographer Douglas McMurtrie was the national director and Jacques Jean Engerrand was the state supervisor for Michigan. The Bentley Library has the published volume (listed in the printed materials catalog), as well as seven linear feet of notes on all the items discovered in the survey, from which the publication was compiled. These notes are listed in the manuscripts catalog under Michigan Imprints Inventory and cover publications of the years 1796-1876 (note the longer time span).

The Federal Writers Project commenced in 1935 and operated in many of the counties of the nation. According to a Michigan Writers Project blurb put out by the WPA, the purpose of the project was to "interpret the life, the history, and the local setting of the community to the state and to the nation." This project produced many publications: state and local guides, tour books, folklore and ethnic studies, children's books, and almanacs, many of which are in the Bentley Library. The Michigan Writers Project was transferred to the State WPA in 1939 and writer Harold Titus became state supervisor. The Historical Records Survey was under the Federal Writers Project for a year, so some of their records were interfiled. The Bentley has a few Michigan Writers Project records in the H.R.S. collection.

The purpose of the WPA Statewide Museums Project was to establish, organize, operate, and improve local museums throughout the state of Michigan, with all that that entails. The main sponsor was the Board of Regents of the University of Michigan and cosponsors were the individual museums. Dorothy Myers was consultant and state supervisor of the Museums Project and Dr. Carl Guthe, director of museums at the university and a member of the project's advisory committee, was also very involved with it. Museums in Kalamazoo, Battle Creek, Holland, Grand Rapids, Lansing, East Lansing, Port Huron, Alpena, Ann Arbor, and Detroit were all greatly assisted by the program. Although the museums project was separate from the H.R.S., the records that came from the University of Michigan were interfiled with the Michigan H.R.S. material.

In 1942, when there was no longer a need to provide "make-work" projects because of the "real" work needed for the war effort, the Historical Records Survey was terminated. In Michigan, most of the records of the H.R.S. were given, shortly thereafter, to the Michigan Historical Collections, which was the official cosponsor of the project and the official depository for the H.R.S.'s unpublished materials as well as its publications. Other records were given to the Detroit Public Library's Burton Historical Collection (see Appendix III): 2 boxes of correspondence and reports; 4 boxes of typescript drafts on the following counties: Charlevoix, Chippewa, Clare, Dickinson, Genesee (which did get published), Gogebic, Houghton, Huron, Keweenaw, Lapeer, Macomb, Menominee, Midland, Missaukee, Oakland, St. Clair, and Tuscola; and 22 boxes of correspondence and field forms for the Inventory of Church and Synagogue Archives in Michigan, whose publications, as already mentioned, are housed in the Bentley Historical Library. The State Library of Michigan, in Lansing, has most of the Historical Records Survey's publications (see Appendix II). The State Archives, also in Lansing, has indexes to vital records and listings of WPA enterprises (complete with costs and much other information, very useful for any researcher studying the WPA). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has microfilm copies of many of the H.R.S.'s publications (see Appendix IV). Loretta Hefner compiled The W.P.A. Historical Records Survey: A Guide to the Unpublished Inventories, Indexes, and Transcripts (published by the Society of American Archivists in 1980), which contains additional locations of H.R.S. materials throughout the nation. In addition, the National Archives in Washington D.C. contains a great deal of H.R.S. material, in Record Group 69 (see Appendix V). There is a related collection at the Bentley Library. Since the Michigan Historical Collections was official cosponsor and some of the WPA work was done in it s offices (as well as having some of its own work done by WPA workers), the Bentley Library also has WPA files in the "University of Michigan. Michigan Historical Collections." archival collection. These consist of correspondence, mostly, in connection with the Michigan Writers Project, the Historical Records Survey, and the Statewide Museums Project.

Due to its poor quality, much of the paper used in the Historical Records Survey has deteriorated badly over the years. In order to preserve the information contained therein, most of the collection has been microfilmed. Some materials have been preserved in their original form without being filmed and some have been retained after filming, but most of the papers that were filmed have been discarded. This is described in more detail in the following description of the records.

From the guide to the Michigan Historical Records Survey records, 1936-1942, (Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan)

The Michigan Imprints Inventory is Michigan's portion of the American Imprints Inventory, a project of the Historical Records Survey of the 1930s and early 1940s. The American Imprints Inventory was begun in 1936 under the direction of Douglas McMurtrie, with the purpose of creating an inventory of early books, serials, and broadsides printed in the United States. The date limit for works to be inventoried varied initially from region to region, but was later revised to include all works printed before the end of 1876.

Historical Records Survey offices in each state conducted the inventory. The inventory was prepared by sending researchers to libraries, where they copied catalog records for all books, serials, and broadsides printed before the cutoff date. Descriptions were prepared in two formats. Works were first described following "Style B," which generally used standard library cataloging conventions. At the request of the national office, older works and works not appearing in standard bibliographies were later re-described, following "Style A," a form of rare book cataloging indicating line ends and ornaments, but not collations. The intent was to publish bibliographies of Style A descriptions for early imprints of each state and major city.

Inventory slips were sent by the state offices to the American Imprints Inventory office in Chicago, where a number of state and city bibliographies were edited and published. When McMurtrie resigned as director in 1941, the imprints inventory project ended at the national level. At that time, inventory slips were returned to the state Historical Records Survey offices in several states, including Michigan, for final editing and publication. The Style A descriptions were edited back to Style B, and the states published "preliminary checklists" covering the work done to that point.

From the guide to the Michigan Imprints Inventory records, 1936-1941, (Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan)