Coffee County Historical Society Receives Grant from TN State Library Archives Development Program.

The Tennessee State Library and Archives’ Archives Development Program has bestowed a grant on the Coffee County Historical Society to help in the Society’s project of rehousing, scanning and cataloging its large collection of photographic negatives. The grant totaling $1700, helped purchase over 12 thousand archival envelopes. 

The Historical Society owns 40 thousand + photographic negatives in two collections. The largest portion of these negatives were taken by Hugh Doak, former owner, editor and publisher of the Manchester Times. The smaller number were taken by Russell Tarver. All of these negatives were kept in their original non-archival envelopes and while kept in alphabetical order, were not easily accessible to researchers. The grant project is to rehouse these negatives in archival envelopes and the envelopes in archival boxes. The Society removed inferior wooden (chipboard) shelving and used its own funds to replace them with two metal shelving units. The new archival boxes will be housed on these shelves as well as the metal shelving original to the Historic Courthouse vault where the negatives are kept.

In addition to rehousing the negatives, each one is being scanned and saved to an external hard drive. Finally, identifying information about each negative is added to the Society’s catalogue of holdings. The catalogue is on the Society’s in-house network as well as its web page, however due to space constraints and the high number of negatives, the images will not be online with the exception of occasional photos of particular community interest. Nevertheless, researchers are encouraged to ask Society volunteers to search for photographs of their ancestors and other loved ones. The Society will print them on photo paper or send them as email attachments for a small fee. 

Since there are so many negatives, this is a multi-year project. The Society hopes to be finished within four to five years.