The Singing River Genealogy and Local History Library was recently the recipient of the 2020 Cultural Heritage Digitization Award offered annually by the Mississippi Digital Library (MDL), in conjunction with partners from across the state. The chosen collection is published electronically as part of the Mississippi Digital Library at the University of Southern Mississippi.
As the awardee of the 2020 Cultural Heritage Digitization Award, the Singing River Library received digitization services for materials highlighting Mississippi’s international history and specialized training to continue to preserve and share the rich history of George and Jackson counties on the MS Gulf Coast.
The Brenda Brentz Heinsch Papers collection contains letters, photographs, and ephemera recording daily activities and significant life events for Germans and German Americans in the late 1800s/early 1900s through the lens of the Breutz/Brentz-Hansen family of Germany and Escatawpa, MS. Heinsch’s research provides insight into Germany’s social norms and class structure, prejudice towards Germans and German Americans, and poor living conditions in post-WWII Germany.
MDL has an extensive digital collection of state and local historic collections which now include the local history collection that is being digitized at the Singing River library. Future plans include creating more digital exhibits to help further engage local communities with a hope of helping teachers with local history resources. Anyone may view the collections at MDL at https://msdiglib.org/jsg.
Singing River Library has been working on digitizing many collections since 2006. With the help of MDL, the library has several collections available on-line – both on the MDL website and a new Singing River Digital Archive. For more information on MDL partners, visit www.msdiglib.org/about/partners/jsg.
Over the last few years, various volunteers and groups, the Library system IT staff and interns, have given hundreds of man-hours to get the collections up and online. So far, SRGLHL has four collections that are fully digitized and made available at http://glh.jgrls.org.
For more information about the library, call 769-3078. The Library is located at 3214 Pascagoula Street. Find the website at www.jgrls.org.
