Voices from past uploaded to Web

Columbia College on Wednesday launched an addition to its library Web site — the Oral History Series, a collection of over 200 hours of local history from the mouths of people who lived it.

The college took a collection of oral histories tape recorded from a class former instructor Richard Dyer conducted starting in 1971 and a collection from the Tuolumne County Historical Society, of oral histories recorded as early as 1949, and digitized the tape recordings into streaming mp3’s, said Librarian Brian Greene.
 

 Oral histories include Charles Leidig, the first white man born in Yosemite National Park in the 1860s, Me-Wuk Indian Chief William Fuller, Tuolumne County Historian Carlo DeFerrari and Tuolumne County Sheriff Miller Sardella.

Accounts detail cattle ranching, gold mines and locations in Tuolumne County, and to a lesser extent Calaveras and Amador counties.

Well known area families and figures are also represented in oral histories given by Julius Baer, Ted Bird, Beverly Barron, Charles Dambacher, Geraldine McConnell, Dolores Nicolini, Archie Stevenot, Irving J. Symons, Brown Tadd and many others.

Through a donation from the Wise Family Charitable Trust, via the Columbia College Foundation, the digitization and transcription effort began in 2007 to preserve the collection and make it available to a wider audience, Greene said.

The bulk of the work was completed by students with help from college Online Services developer Jake Beck to create the database and online interface, Greene said.

About one-fifth of the collection has been transcribed and some oral histories include photos, Greene said.

“For the foreseeable future, this project will be a work in progress as we continue to make more of the collection available online and transcribe additional interviews. We also hope to identify photographs of all the interviewees to include with the recordings,” Greene wrote on the site’s introduction.

The college did this digitization project not only to preserve the tape recordings, which are also now available in the Library on CD, but also to make the histories more widely available, Greene said.

“Everyone anywhere in the world who’s interested in Mother Lode history can access them online,” Greene said.

“I think it’s a wonderful collection and it’s certainly very representative. ... There’s nothing like hearing about the good old days from someone who actually lived them,” said area historian Sharon Marovich, of the Tuolumne County Historical Society.

Marovich said the Oral History Series is a major contribution to Tuolumne County and a valuable tool for future historians.

“I’m highly supportive of it and hope it will continue,” Richard Dyer said. “There is a lot of information there, that will be useful.”

“Some of these histories are fascinating,” Greene said, adding that he hopes this project will spark a renewed interest in oral histories.

“There are a lot of fascinating people in the community ... that should be captured,” Greene said.