From Old Case Files, New Histories Emerge
Above: FROM LEFT: Maroua Rahaoui ’24, Tiernan O’Neal ’25, and Professor Tona Hangen in the Museum of Worcester’s library, where they spent the summer poring over archival treasures.
A history professor and two English majors spent the summer uncovering the early 20th century experience of everyday Worcester residents.
By Rebecca Cross
Photos by Nancy Sheehan
Inside the library of the Museum of Worcester, Professor of History Tona Hangen carefully retrieves a seemingly ordinary folder—one that holds a trove of historical treasures. It is part of an extensive collection of 3,800 case files documenting the lives of people aided by one of the city’s most remarkable and enduring social services initiatives. Established in the 1890s, the Edward Street Temporary Home and Day Nursery provided shelter and support to low-income women and children in Worcester for more than half a century.
For 12 weeks last summer, Hangen and two students worked to preserve and digitize this collection. The work was made possible through a Summer Undergraduate Research Grant, provided through the Worcester State Foundation. These grants offer up to $1,500 in funding for faculty and $3,000 for students for 12 weeks of work.
Every time she teaches her Social History class, Hangen takes her students on a field trip to the museum (which recently changed its name from the Worcester Historical Museum) to work with this collection. Each student chooses a file—“the fatter, the better,” Hangen said—and tries to write an accurate narrative of the family using only its contents.
“You have these really partial records,” Hangen said. “It requires students to do their own interpreting. They like that kind of assignment, because they can’t Google the answer. It requires them to do some critical thinking and even imaginative thinking.”
The files span the years 1907 to 1952 and represent people who temporarily stayed in the home for either shelter or residential care, as well as children enrolled in Edward Street’s day nursery. This time period, which encompasses World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, the Great Depression, and World War II, was marked by great upheaval in the city, nation, and world. It was also a period that brought many European immigrants to the city.
As a social and cultural historian, Hangen focuses her research on “ordinary” people, those who don’t leave behind autobiographies and don’t appear in the news. “I have always had an interest in the everyday lives of people,” said Hangen. “I guess I’m nosy. Like a lot of historians.”
What makes the Edward Street collection so remarkable, Hangen said, is that it’s a portrait of Worcester’s poor and working class during the years in which a child welfare system developed in the state. “It gives a really interesting portrait of people we don’t usually hear from,” she said. “People who didn’t necessarily leave their own records show up in these records in a way that gives us a fascinating portrait of the city.”
Maroua Rahaoui ’24 pulls out an old directory while Professor Tona Hangen and Tiernan O’Neal ’25 study a book.
“There’s something about history that makes the world seem both so much bigger and so much smaller at the same time.” – Maroua Rahaoui ‘24
A Trove of Stories–and Data
Last summer, Hangen, along with Tiernan O’Neal ’25 and Maroua Rahaoui ’24, worked steadily for an average of 20 hours a week from June through August. They spent much of that time in the museum archives. The archivist would pull a box of files, and the team of three would photograph every item inside and enter its information into a spreadsheet. It was a slow process. Each Edward Street file typically contains five or six documents, but the thickest files hold as many as 30 intake forms, letters, reports, medical and court records, and the occasional news clipping. Hangen and her students photographed and uploaded 5,648 documents in all.
“They did incredible work, and it was done quite quickly. I couldn’t believe it,” said Wendy Essery, the library’s archivist. The next step will be for Hangen and her students to transcribe the handwritten files, tag and categorize all the files, and ultimately develop a public, open-source, downloadable dataset of the collection. Researchers around the world will be able to access it, but since the files contain sensitive information such as Social Security numbers and medical histories, they will need to first get a log-in from the library. It’s a tricky balance, said Essery. “We’re protecting it, but we want it to be accessible, too.”
Archives like that at the Museum of Worcester preserve materials in paper, but paper is fragile. Digitization offers a more permanent way to preserve collections. Digitized copies can be made more widely accessible than paper materials and allow historians to more easily extract and aggregate data. That data aggregation—of information such as addresses, salary, ethnicity, and birthplace—gives historians a collective portrait that individual case files can’t provide. By crunching this sort of data, Hangen said, historians can raise previously unconsidered questions that might take their research in new directions.
The collection will be of value to researchers in a variety of fields, Hangen said, from public health to criminal justice to psychology.
Professor Tona Hangen looks over some archival files.
“A lot of what I do is helping students become aware of history and how they’re a part of it. It’s in their own lives. It’s in our own city. It’s on our own campus.” – Professor Tona Hangen (shown here looking over some archival files)
A Human Experience Across Time
The collection was certainly of interest to the two English majors who worked with Hangen last summer.
O’Neal was born and raised in Worcester, which gave the project special significance for her. “Most of the time,” she said, “you’re learning about the people in power and the people who made incredible change on a national scale, but you’re not looking at the people walking down the street and what they’re going through and what their experience is. Something that I saw while reading these stories in the case files is that they were dealing with the same things that people today are dealing with. There are the same financial struggles or the same family struggles, but also the same funny stories. Even though it’s 100 years ago, it’s still a human experience.”
Rahaoui, who has lived in Worcester since she was 5, became fascinated with the stories contained in the files. “There’s something about history that makes the world seem both so much bigger and so much smaller at the same time,” she said. “Bigger in that there are so many places we don’t know about, cultures and languages and stories that have been forgotten to time. But also smaller in that we’re all human and our stories are all interconnected and interwoven. There’s a special kind of beauty in that.”
The students’ perspectives as English
majors and the questions they asked “expanded the work in really interesting ways,” Hangen said. “I find that kind of interdisciplinary collaboration really interesting. That’s one of the reasons I work at Worcester State: We do work across those disciplinary boundaries in ways that, as an educator and as a scholar, I find exciting.”
Today, the former Edward Street Temporary Home and Day Nursery houses the Rainbow Child Development Center, which provides childcare, preschool, and afterschool programs for children ages 6 weeks to 13 years.
“The women who founded this building were empowering other women to succeed and believe in themselves and gain economic self-sufficiency,” said Nancy Thibault, the center’s strategic communication and development manager. “We continue the spirit of what this building was all about. The women who started this would be very pleased. We have to be empathetic and help folks. That’s what Worcester’s all about.”
“History is present in everything around us,” said Hangen. “Everything has a history, and history informs everything, whether you’re aware of it or not. A lot of what I do is helping students become aware of history and how they’re a part of it. It’s in their own lives. It’s in our own city. It’s on our own campus. It’s absolutely essential. If we lose our sense of the past, then we have a really impoverished society.”
And now, the museum is looking ahead to future collaborations with Worcester State.
“In 2019, we got a similar collection, but with case files of elderly people,” Essery said. “Tona’s already eyeing it.”
