Angela Hall

History 2710

Spring 2002

Service Learning Project

www.geocities.com/angieshall/She-Saw-a-Century.html

My great-grandmother, Edris Wall, died in March 2001 at the age of 98. Last Christmas, my grandmother and her siblings had the journal my great-grandmother had kept during her life bound into a book and gave it to their grandchildren as a gift. As I read the stories of her long incredible life, I thought that it would be a valuable historical resource. She tells of famous historical events but from the perspective of a regular rural Utah woman trying to raise a large family through wars, epidemics, economic difficulties, health problems, injuries, and deaths.

I decided I would like to share her experiences with others interested in history– particularly Utah or social history. I also wanted to provide brief background information to the events she talks about so that members of the Wall family, especially the younger generation, could have a better understanding of the facts and details of the these events and why they impacted my great-grandmother. So that many people could gain access to the information, I chose to create a website that would display excerpts from my great-grandmother’s journal about specific events along with relevant pictures and links to other sites that provide detailed background information to the events. By creating this website I am giving service to a large community of interested learners and my own family members as I make primary source material available on the World Wide Web.

The title of my project is She Saw a Century: A Website Documenting Edris Wall’s Accounts of 20^th Century Events. My great-grandmother, Edris Wall, lived from 1902 to 2001 and experienced nearly all the major historical events of the twentieth century including the technological boom of the early 1900's, deadly diseases, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Korean War. She literally did see and experience a century of tumult and difficulty as well as technological and medical innovation that saved lives and made everyday living easier.

The project is intended to be a resource for students, teachers, and anyone interested in history. In searching on the web, they can find first-hand accounts of the events of the twentieth century to use for research or just interesting reading. For example, a student seeking to understand more about how a regular person felt during the Great Depression could read the excerpts from Edris’s journal and learn how she felt about rations, public works, and welfare ( www.geocities.com/angieshall/1930-1940.html ). She and her family received assistance from the new welfare system, and a student could see how a typical person who lived during that era and valued independence, self-sufficiency, and hard work felt about receiving help from the government–usually guilty and helpless. Just reading about Roosevelt’s "New Deal" in a textbook does not provide the same vivid understanding as reading Edris’s real experience with some of his programs. I certainly gained a deeper appreciation for the people who lived through these hardships in the 1900's, and I think other students would too.

Another beneficiary of this website will be Edris’s family. She had nine children, all of whom are still alive, who have many children and grandchildren of their own. In all, Edris left a posterity of thirty-six grandchildren, 107 great-grandchildren, and forty-two great-great-grandchildren, with that number growing every year. Not all of these family members received a copy of Edris’s journal. My website provides an easily accessible and long-lasting record of some of the historically significant experiences in Edris’s life to the many great- and great-great-grandchildren who never met her or will get a copy of her journal. I have preserved her memories for them. With the links to factual background information of the events that I have provided along with Edris’s accounts, the family can also better understand how and why the things that she experienced happened.

This was mostly an independent project as I made web pages with information from my great-grandmother’s journal. However, I did contact my grandmother, Thearl Wall Park, to gain permission to create the site and post Edris’s words on the World Wide Web. She readily agreed and thought the project was a good idea. She is excited to share the completed website with her family.

The workload of this project turned out to be much more than I had anticipated when I first proposed it. I planned to spend a few hours each week researching background information and then creating the web pages. However, I did not stay on schedule and ended up working on it intensely for four or five weeks instead of doing a little at a time throughout the semester. I would suggest for future service learning projects that students report on the progress of their projects at regular intervals during the semester so that they work evenly throughout the semester. I found that when I started on a page for a certain subject, I wanted to keep working on it until it was complete. This meant more lengthy, concentrated work for me. I had not expected the time it would take just to work out technical and appearance details like backgrounds, spacing, layout, pictures, and links. Also, scanning pictures and documents and digitizing video were time-consuming processes, especially when I had difficulties with the equipment or software.

I had wanted to do my own in-depth background research to the historical events, but I decided to make the background information briefer and put links to other good sites that already had thorough explanations of the events. This way I could still provide background information but could concentrate more on getting Edris’s words and experiences posted on my pages since that was the ultimate goal of my project.

The whole production of my project depended on technological resources. I thought that the only way I could get my website hosted for free would be to create it through Yahoo! Geocities. I used Yahoo! Pagebuilder to make my web pages. Since Yahoo! is hosting my website for free, an advertisement must appear on my pages. This is very distracting at first, but the ad quickly closes to a small box at the top of the page. The Pagebuilder software was very easy to use but also somewhat limiting in the kinds of fonts, image formats, and layouts I could use. I did like that I could work on the website on any computer with access to the internet–at home, at school, or anywhere else. That is part of the reason I initially decided to use Yahoo! to host my site. Late in the semester, after most of the website was complete, I realized that I could probably have had S.U.U. host the site through its server. This probably would make the site more credible, and with the University’s web page software it could have been more dynamic in appearance. However, it was too late to change at that point, and I would have probably had to work on the site completely at the University’s computer labs which would have been difficult for me.

The other technology-related resources I used were a scanner and video-digitizing equipment. I used the scanner to scan pictures from Edris’s journal to include on my website. For example, I included a picture of her at 95 years old on the home page, pictures of her sons who went to war, a copy of her World War II war ration book, and a copy of the newspaper article about her son being blinded in a mining accident. The images did not scan as clearly as I would have liked, but they are still recognizable.

I was excited to use a video-digitizer to put a short clip of an interview my cousin did with my great-grandmother in 1992 about the Great Depression on the website because it would help viewers get to know her better and also hear the emotion in her voice as she talked about the hard times she went through. I used the equipment in the Macintosh lab at the university to digitize the video, and I finally succeeded in linking the short Quicktime movie to my site (on the Macintosh). I was very disappointed, however, when I could not get the video to work on I.B.M. computers. For now, it is only playable on Macintosh computers, but I will continue to try to make it accessible to P.C. users.

This type of project could possibly be extended so that other people’s (perhaps Utahns) personal memories of the 20^th century could be made available through a website. I have heard of many students who have recorded oral histories of elderly people for their projects. The transcriptions or audio recordings of these histories could be shared on the web so that they are permanently preserved and available to interested people. As a direct connection to my project, it would be beneficial if someone could do more research on certain aspects of Goshen, Utah history such as mining, boarding houses, or impacts of diseases. From Edris’s journal, it seems that these were very significant in the shaping of the culture there. Another idea for a project could be for someone to contact the Utah State Historical Society and work on getting a place on the Society’s web page for college students’ historical projects, research, and websites to be published so that a wider audience can see and learn from the work students are doing. I, for example, am not sure how to publicize my site so that others can make use full use of it.

It was necessary for me to comb through my great-grandmother’s journal several times to pick out what I wanted to share about her experiences. I ended up pulling excerpts that pertained mostly to famous historical events. There were a few less famous subjects like the treatment of mental patients in the 1960's (Edris was a nurse) or the mining boarding houses that I would like to research more fully and include on the site when I have more information. It was difficult to choose how much of her personal life to include or leave out. I did create a few links that would help viewers get to know Edris more personally like the biography (www.geocities.com/angieshall/biography.html), pictures, genealogy chart (www.geocities.com/angieshall/geneaologychart.html), and map of Goshen, Utah. For the background information to the events, I searched the internet and used my own resources. I evaluated the different sites and tried to choose those that were most accurate, objective, thorough, and if possible related to Utah history.

Personally, I learned a lot from completing this project. In this way, it was a success because I gained a more concrete and personal knowledge of history and my own heritage. I also think that many of the web pages I created turned out well and will be helpful to others. Some pages are more interesting and visually pleasing than others. The pages about automobiles (www.geocities.com/angieshall/automobiles.com)and Coca-cola ( www.geocities.com/angieshall/coke.html )

are intriguing because I have provided pictures and links that give interesting information about the products. I was especially interested in the way Coca-cola’s own website glossed over its history, completely leaving out any mention of the inclusion of cocaine in the drink’s early days. To give a perhaps more accurate view of their history I included a link to another, more objective source that gave a thorough background to Coke’s beginnings. These links are another success of the project because they make it easy for the viewer to quickly get an explanation of the event without having to search the whole internet for a site with real content.

I would like to be able to have the site hosted by a non-commercial server so that there would not have to be advertisements on my pages and the site could be found more easily. I also would like to include more visual images so that the pages are more interesting. However, this takes the pages longer to load so it might be bothersome to the viewer. Also, the video clip takes a long time to load, and I would like to find a way to make it faster either by shortening the clip or presenting it in a different format. As I stated previously, I also want to make the video playable for all viewers.

Concerning the content of the website, I would like to cover more topics from the later part of the century. However, as Edris got older she did not mention many world events anymore. She could not write as well and only jotted short notes mostly about her personal life. I would also like to include a more detailed description of her life and her family.

Overall, I feel that my project was successful. It was a lot of work, but I learned from it and I think my family and other students will find it to be beneficial. I wish I had more experience and training in designing and publishing web pages, but I did the best I could with what knowledge I did have. I hope to continue to improve the project as I learn more about web design. History service learning helped me to acquire new skills and a greater appreciation for the history and experiences of my great-grandmother.