It's been a while since I did an update on my summer internship at the State Historical Society of Iowa. This is for a few reasons. 1. I've worked kind of irregularly the past few weeks due to a dentist appointment and a scrape with a cold. 2. It didn't even seem like there was enough to write a whole post about. So now I'm going to write about the past three weeks at my internship. If you haven't read any of these posts until now I'll let you know what I'm doing. I work in the archives at the state historical society and go through personal papers of a former governor and then put them into the computer. I also take death certificates from the 1920's and enter them into the computer.
Awhile ago I mentioned I had found death certificates from 1928 where a man had shot his wife and three-year-old child. Well a couple weeks after that I was going through death certificates again, still in 1928 and saw a name I thought looked familiar. "It's the husband," I thought, and started to enter everything in. Then I looked at the dates and realized it couldn't possibly be the husband, because this person was only five years old. I was right though, he had been shot by his father (the same man from the first set of death certificates). I went to the next one and saw a girl with the same last name. A three-month-old girl shot by her father. And then finally, the man himself. Killed himself. Why wasn't this man in jail? How did he manage to pull this off? What provoked him to shoot his wife, three children, and then himself? It's a horrible story, but I have to know what happened so I'm thinking about going to the State Historical Library and seeing if there is anything about in the microfilm. I have to satisfy my curiosity!
The closer I get to 1930, the more suicides I see. It's depressing, but incredibly interesting from a historical standpoint. Most of the deaths are see are just "normal" deaths, but lately it's seemed like 1/15 have been suicides... and this is in a small town. I'm almost done with the 20's in this county and I'm amazed that I've gone through about ten years of history for this place in just seven weeks. If I had it my way, I would probably spend all of my time indexing death certificates, but the other project I'm working on is huge and they really need help with it. One of the state archivists teased me last week though. She said, "You know you've been here too long when death certificates become a nice break."
I really am amazed that I've been working in this place for almost two months. I've enjoyed my time in the archives, but I want to try out several other forms of library science before I go to library school. In the fall I start a job in the preservation department at the University of Iowa, which will be sort of related to what I do now. I'd like to get a job in a public library next summer.