Love Letter to the BDC's Past and Present Volunteers

The BDC Research Room is very lucky to have 6 talented volunteer "Points of Light" at the moment. Their names are Deborah, Joe, Kathy, Laura, Peggy, and Nancy. Each has a project that contributes to the BDC's goals and mission to provide access to research materials about local history. In ways large and small, they help us spread light onto the long and storied history of Beaufort District, its peoples, its places, and its challenges through time. I don't know what I would do without them.

Joe, Laura, and Peggy have been helping in the BDC for many years on a variety of projects.

Joe is a retired Beaufort County employee from GIS who finished digitizing the Reed Collection of Civil War era photographs and is now digitizing the Behan Papers. The Behan Papers consists of approximately 1600 pages of “land genealogies” of early properties and property owners and their families from the late 17th– early 19th centuries in Beaufort District, SC compiled over 15 years by Bill Behan of Callawassie and Sun City.

Peggy, a retired degreed media specialist, who has helped me with some Culp indexing in the past, is currently indexing and re-foldering the Behan Papers contents so that in-room researchers can more easily access that which they seek. In other words, they will be able to call for a particular file from the storage area rather than go page by page through a binder to find the property or family that they are most interested in learning more about. Her project also has the added dividend of protecting both BDC staff backs. No longer will we have to haul out the heavy box each time a researcher wants to see just a part of the collection. Doing so also helps maximize storage in the stacks.

In the past several years, Laura has done almost all the behind-the-scenes work on the BDC's "Wales Journal" project. She did the transcriptions, digitization, and created the bulk of the metadata. The "Susan Wales Journal, 1887 - 1895" is a charming daily record of a young woman's time abroad in Europe. Most pages contain a small sketch or painting of people, places, things she encountered that day.

Laura is now helping with the merging of vertical files from Hilton Head Branch and Beaufort Branch into the BDC's array folder by folder. This often includes photocopying decaying newsprint, researching clipping dates, and organizing individual folder contents in reverse chronological order. It's a time consuming task that requires the ability to see both the big picture and the granularity of a particular item, an understanding of the research process, and how to keep things organized.

Kathy also a degreed librarian and a former BCL administrator is indexing obituaries. She has indexed about 5000 obituaries in the Beaufort Gazette and Island Packet since she became a BDC Docent in 2021.

Deborah is a retired degreed librarian, former Library Director, and an archivist who is working on finalizing the Finding Aid for the "Beaufort Three-Century Project" collection. When she's done, you'll see the collection featured as a "Finding Aid Friday" post. It is rare to have someone who led a community project who has the skill set to serve as a volunteer processing archivist for the stewardship organization who holds the archive in trust for that community post-project. Long time residents may recall that Deborah was the Executive Director of the Beaufort Three-Century Project that celebrated the City's 300th birthday in 2011. She joined the ranks as a BDC Docent in January 2023.The BDC is fortunate indeed.

Nancy is my newest volunteer. She is a retired former state employee who has a library degree. She's helping create metadata for the BDC's upcoming digital projects.

Truly without them, and the dedicated BDC docents before them, your access to local history materials would be considerably diminished. There would be no online Donner collection or Civil War and Reconstruction era photographs collections, or BDC map index, or the 9-11 Oral Histories. If you run into one of them when you're out and about, please say "Thank you for your service to the Beaufort County Library."

I'm in the trenches each and every day but it is they who help lead me towards the light at the end of the tunnel. Never could I have lasted so long on this job without the dedication, support, and loving kindness of all the SC Room and BDC volunteers lo these many years. Let's give three cheers for these and former dedicated, loyal, and skilled Beaufort County Library volunteers: Hip! Hip! Hooray! Hip! Hip! Hooray! Hip! Hip! Hooray! Thank you, Beloved BDC docents.