2024 Summer SURG

Brief Description: Social historians are primarily concerned with the lives of non-famous people, especially those who left little written record of their own. Worcester State University is situated within the City of Worcester, which has many untapped stories of working class, immigrant, and socioeconomically disadvantaged residents (populations who historically have often lacked the power and resources to record their own history). Historical collections exist locally in the Worcester Historical Museum (WHM) which could help us better understand these populations through the tools and methods of social history. Those tools and methods approach such people in the past both as discrete individuals and by employing aggregate data about their lives from public sources, archival collections, and other records. In this multi-year digital humanities project, students will work with social historian Dr. Tona Hangen (History and Political Science Department) on two collections of archival social work casefiles.

Collection 1: The Edwards Street Temporary Home and Day Nursery Collection (THDN) comprises twelve 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 Edwards Street home 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. 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. [Worcester Historical Museum, Collection 2004.04, see also Collection 2012.41]

Collection 2: Associated Charities of Worcester (AC), an umbrella organization emblematic of the “scientific charity movement” that helped fund and provide, among other services, a home for pregnant teens, foster care, poverty programs that predated federal welfare, visiting home nurses, and child abuse prevention in and around Worcester in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [Worcester Historical Museum, Collection 2022.11]

Goals: The project’s longterm goal is to create and publish a public, open source, searchable, downloadable dataset utilizing the information in these 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. 

Summer 2024 Team Accomplishments: 

Completed photographing approx 3850 casefiles in their entirety and uploaded to Google Drive. 

Partially completed renaming and organizing the digitized images and transcribing some of the casefiles. 

Piloted different modes of data entry of key metadata.

Created six supplementary resource documents for the research collection.

Collected related archival material at Museum of Worcester, Holy Cross, Worcester Public Library, Boston College, and Simmons University. 

Collaborated with a scholar working on similar topics at Illinois State University. 

Visited the old THDN building to connect with its current occupants, Rainbow Child Development.

The research team presented its findings at a public event on November 7, 2024: "Hard Times and Community Assistance in Worcester: The Edward Street Temporary Home and Day Nursery, 1905-1940." (Commonwealth Honors Project Event for both students). 

Tiernan won the 2025 Library Research Award for her poster at the Worcester State University Celebration of Scholarship and Creativity, "Edward Street Temporary Home and Day Nursery."