Making History: Celebrating Student Transcribers for National Volunteer Week

Volunteering can deepen community connections and transform lives. In our Making History crowdsourcing program, Library of Virginia staff work with volunteers to transcribe historical documents and make them more accessible. In 2024, we had: 

For National Volunteer Week, we checked back in with the Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School (MLWGS) incredible Transcribe Team! We first began working with this school in 2017, having found a wonderful partnership with MLWGS Librarian Wendy DeGroat (see more here). Ms. DeGroat is instrumental in helping Library of Virginia staff connect with students who need volunteer hours. She fosters a welcoming and encouraging environment in the transcribe-a-thons at MLWGS throughout the school year, and student leadership via the Transcribe Team Advisors role. Students are empowered to participate in crowdsourcing projects from the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and the Library of Virginia. Between October 2024 and now, MLWGS students have contributed 40,681 minutes of volunteer transcription to our Making History program. Read the reflections from the Transcribe Team Advisors below! 

Hello! My name is Maverick and I am currently a junior in high school. I went to one of Ms. DeGroat’s Transcribe-A-Thon’s for the first time during my freshman year. I really enjoyed getting to learn how to transcribe and meeting the people that were there to support me along the way. The team of advisors was very helpful and supportive towards all of the new people and I knew that I wanted to be one in the future. Now that I am, I’m happy to be able to help other people who want to get into transcribing while helping the organization grow. I was able to get a lot of volunteering hours from transcribing and I learned a lot about many historical records and events because of it. 

I have always loved computers and technology and was super excited when I learned that I could fulfill my high school requirements with something as enjoyable as simply converting old documents into a more modern form. 

I was surprised by the fact that I could make such a positive impact on the Library of Virginia simply by typing on my computer! I thought this was a very interesting concept and I wanted to keep transcribing more documents. In doing so, I have become a more proficient typist and have learned a lot about the importance of historical records.

The World War II Separation Notices were some of my favorite documents to transcribe. They were one of the few categories that was easy to read and made me feel connected to our nation’s history on a deeper level. These documents made me realize just how important this war was since many men were dropping out of high schools and colleges just to serve their country. Many of them became truck drivers afterward and I found this pattern to be truly interesting. These documents helped to spark my desire to learn more about history and the United States as a whole.

I am excited to continue to make contributions to the Maggie Walker transcribing team as well as the Library of Virginia. I hope to continue transcribing through high school and working to ensure that historical documents can be more easily accessed by everyone. I want to thank Ms. DeGroat for the amazing opportunity of being an advisor on the transcribing team and I cannot wait to help new students become as passionate as I am about transcribing!

My name is David Lins, and I have been transcribing at MLWGS since 2022. At first, my favorite project to work on was the Virginia Untold collection of free registers from various counties around the state. These records provide some important information about people’s lives that may have otherwise not been well recorded. By transcribing them, I was able to help make them more accessible and searchable, which allows both individuals and other researchers to discover more about their families’ past as well as the local histories of our counties and cities. 

Although I have not lost interest in the [transcriptions for the] Virginia Untold project, I have also done a lot of work on other collections. Still related to Virginia history, I have contributed to the collection of Cemetery Interment Cards for Woodland Cemetery, an African American cemetery in Richmond where Arthur Ashe and other important figures are buried.

Another favorite collection of mine is the World War I service record forms collection. These two types of documents stood out to me because, although they were very different from each other, they both felt relevant to me. They included the addresses of people’s homes in them, and I was able to search many of them up online and see how those places look today.

Another collection that brought me closer to the history of our state was the separation notices from World War II. Arguably, these provide the most detailed information about a person’s life out of any of the documents because they cover education, civilian and military occupations, and even marriage status. What made them most special to me, though, was that I was able to find records of two different people who attended Maggie Walker High School. As a Maggie Walker student, it was extremely cool to find that I have something in common with a person I’ll never meet by a document from nearly 80 years ago. 

Transcribing for me isn’t just a way to get service hours. It’s a way to become more connected to your community’s past and make it easier for others to do the same. Some of my own family members are very passionate about researching information about our family and local history, so I am glad to help others accomplish the same task by preserving and expanding access to these documents through transcription. 

I began transcribing historical documents for crowdsourcing projects in middle school. I have also served as a Transcribe Team Advisor since my sophomore year. Through our ongoing partnership with the Library of Virginia and transcription work with other archives, we have built a community of over 145 transcribers at Maggie Walker.  

Each year as a Transcribe Team Advisor, I have made it a priority to highlight special collections and encourage transcribers to understand the history behind the handwritten records. The Sheet Music of the Musical Theater collection at the Library of Congress, for example, contains selections from musicals and operettas that provide a window into early 19th- and 20th-century American popular culture. In addition, the Freedmen’s Bureau Records at the Smithsonian Institution includes letters, labor contracts, and indentures of apprenticeship that increase our understanding of the Reconstruction era. I delivered a presentation on this collection at the February Transcribe-a-thon in light of Black History Month and provided a corresponding instruction sheet to assist members of the Transcribe Team. These two special collections exemplify how crowdsourcing projects preserve individual stories and inform our understanding of the social and cultural attitudes of the time period.  

Another way that we have expanded the Transcribe Team at Maggie Walker is through our continued collaboration with the Spanish Honor Society. I hosted a Spanish transcription training session in the fall and developed an informational slideshow for reference throughout the year. Members of the Spanish Honor Society had the opportunity to work on the Herencia: Centuries of Spanish Legal Documents collection in the Library of Congress at the quarterly Transcribe-a-thons to learn about Spanish legal history and earn community service hours. My work as a transcriber and Transcribe Team Advisor has been an integral part of my high school experience. The growth and success of the Transcribe Team at Maggie Walker would not be possible without the Library of Virginia’s support and the empowering work of the Making History project, and I look forward to seeing their continued impact. 

Over the eight years that we’ve partnered with the Library of Virginia (LVA) on their Making History project, our MLWGS Transcribe Team has steadily grown. As Ally mentioned, more than 145 students participated this year, which represents nearly 20% of our student body. Since graduating from MLWGS requires 140 hours of community service, the ability to earn hours by transcribing is often particularly attractive to freshmen, sophomores, and students who live in rural settings. For many of these students, getting to available service opportunities can be a hurdle unless they have a driver’s license, and their own vehicle. After students learn how to transcribe at a Transcribe-a-thon, the LVA staff makes this service opportunity accessible by providing students with individual time logs to verify their work. This gives students the much-appreciated flexibility of transcribing on their own schedule from home—no transportation required. 

With the addition of Transcribe Team Advisors, the MLWGS Transcribe Team now has a leadership development component, an improvement that benefits both the advisors and the rest of our team. The advisors bring new dimensions to the program each year and are a delight to work with. For our team, working with historical documents brings history to life by connecting students with personal stories related to significant national and global events, many of them Virginia stories. When delving into the World War II Separation Notices, volunteers like David Lins discovered notices by soldiers who graduated from Maggie Walker High School, an esteemed institution that preceded our school on this campus. There are also notices in the LVA’s collections from women who served in the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, a group whose story is featured in the 2024 Netflix film Six Triple Eight. 

I am concerned about what recent cuts to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), a substantial source of funding for the LVA’s Making History project, may mean for this program and for libraries, museums, and archives nationwide. Projects like Making History preserve our nation’s past and allow students to see that the events they study in the classroom or research independently happened to real people. Such stories often awaken or deepen students’ interest in learning about American or global history, as Maverick described happened for him, and sometimes to contemplate the history they are living now and what documents capture those experiences. Many thanks to the LVA staff, especially Ms. Sonya Coleman, and the IMLS for making this opportunity possible for all Making History volunteers. May this valuable project continue to make a difference in the years ahead, for people whose experiences are reflected in the digitized documents, and for those who engage with these documents, including our students.