Isabella: Shaping Up the Oldman Files

On Friday, I wanted to clean up the Gordon and Oldman Correspondences for the final deliverable. I went through and began taking pictures and uploading PDFs of all of the important letters and forms that would be interesting for Dr. Zuberi to see firsthand. Then, I went through the letters and made sure I had all of the important information included from their correspondences from 1908 to Gordon's death in 1923. Then, with Alex's assistance, I went through the Registrar's Office boxes to examine the African Section receipts and began taking pictures and uploading PDFs of the receipts that I thought were particularly interesting, from Oldman, Jack Buck, G.B. Gordon Estate, and the John Quinn Estate. 

Through this process, here are the major questions that came up:

Would Dr. Zuberi be interested in pdfs of the receipts of purchases (specifically, of the Oldman Benin Collection) or of shipping papers of the objects arriving from the Philadelphia Trans-Atlantic Line?

How are we going to handle the sheer amount of donors to the African section? There must be master list somewhere. 

Now that I feel comfortable that my Gordon and Oldman Correspondences are complete, I want to clean up and finish the History of the African Section reference sheet. However, every time I feel like I have made a comprehensive list, another donor I've never heard of appears. I will talk to Alex on Monday about whether or not there is a master list, perhaps in the Registrar's Office boxes. I also feel that our research for the donors are scattered across me, Maeve's and Lara's work. I will sit down with them and try to compile everything that we found on donors into that single document. 

Finally, based on even more discoveries in the Gordon boxes, I have been thinking about creating another reference sheet that will include research on the different colonial officers mentioned in the Oldman correspondences. There are multiple mentioned and I think it would be useful to sit down and try to find out as much as possible about them for Dr. Zuberi. However, there is so much to do in such short time, so I will see if creating this is even possible. 


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