Project Details

Brief Description: Local archival collections in Worcester, housed at the Museum of Worcester, preserve thousands of casefiles of this city’s social service agencies with missions to help, house, and employ working class, immigrant, and socioeconomically disadvantaged Worcester residents in the early twentieth century. These agencies cooperated with and existed within a network of state and local services, notably including those for public health and mental health, such as the Worcester Insane Asylum and various state schools for those designated “feeble-minded.” As part of Dr. Tona Hangen’s ongoing public humanities effort to document this history and in the service of the project’s overarching questions, 2025 summer grant-funded work will involve reading and applying qualitative research methods to the digitized casefiles (ca. 1907-1950), such as tagging, transcribing, categorizing, and coding the files to render their data more useful and accessible. In particular, we seek to identify, aggregate, and draw inferences from casefiles that note institutionalization, diagnosis and treatment of mental health conditions in an era predating the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, along with the impacts of psychological and mental health disorders on families and the community.

The Edwards Street Temporary Home and Day Nursery Collection (THDN) at the Museum of Worcester (Collection 2004.04) comprises more than ten fileboxes of handwritten casefiles and other materials related to a private charitable organization that provided a free or low-cost temporary safe house for women and children and free or low-cost child care from the 1880s through the 1950s. The THDN was contemporaneous with Hull House and other settlement houses in major cities designed to assist poor, medically needy, or immigrant families navigate life crises and personal challenges. As we’ve observed, the collection’s casefiles contain a wealth of information about the people served: home situation, workplace and income, ethnicity, religious affiliation, financial precarity, intersections with the criminal justice system, and medical concerns, among others. In Summer 2024, SURG funding allowed us to digitize most of the 3800 casefile contents, which have been uploaded to Google Drive along with a rudimentary spreadsheet index. The project’s longterm goal is to create and publish a public, open source, searchable, downloadable dataset utilizing the information in these collections.

As we worked with the collection’s materials last year, we noticed the prevalence of inter-agency correspondence for both children and adults who intersected with the city and state’s institutions seeking care and treatment of mental health disorders. Their use of diagnostic and descriptive language quite different from that used now, often medicalizing (or even criminalizing) these conditions, has raised questions about how this collection might shed light on the conceptualization and treatment of those with mental illness or experiencing an acute crisis.

Goals: The project’s long-term goal is to create and publish a public, open source, searchable, downloadable dataset utilizing the information in local archival collections. It could be used by historians, demographers, researchers in public health, urban studies, or public policy, or by teachers and students at any level. 

By bringing in 1-2 student researchers on summer research grants, the project can be sustainably carried forward year to year, completing the THDN digitization and developing a workable dataset from the collection’s materials. 

2025 Student Researchers: Kaylee Chen (Nursing / Psychology), Abby Rickert (Urban Studies / WGSS)