East Michigan News

A volunteer researcher with a museum in suburban Detroit discovered microfilm breadcrumbs that led staff to Clarke Historical Library’s digitized newspaper collection and a significant countywide project about the Underground Railroad.

The volunteer was investigating a tip about a Revolutionary War veteran buried in Birmingham when he found clues about former slaves. Following up in the Birmingham Eccentric, preserved on microfilm, would have required extensive work hours.

Donna Casaceli, the Birmingham Museum’s museum specialist and archivist, had an alternative approach. She had met staff from Central Michigan University’s Clarke Historical Library at a conference and knew about their project making digitized copies of Michigan newspapers available for free.

She explored Clarke’s online collection of digitized newspapers. “It was a gold mine,” Casaceli said.

Microfilm remains the standard method for preserving newspapers, but digitizing them provides better access, according to Carrie Marsh, director of Clarke Historical Library. Microfilm requires physical visits, whereas digitization allows internet access. Clarke Historical Library’s digital collection includes a keyword search feature.

Clarke Historical Library staff recently announced they have uploaded more than 1 million newspaper pages to its website DigMichNews.com. Including pages from a Library of Congress collection, nearly 1.2 million pages are available to the public, said Bryan Whitledge, public services librarian with Clarke Historical Library. Altogether, Clarke Historical Library has digitized nearly 2 million pages. As of August 2016, the library offered 240,000 digitized pages.

These represent newspapers across Michigan, including many from the mid-to-northern Lower Peninsula. Several Oakland County newspapers provided Casaceli with insights into the Underground Railroad’s history in that area. The digital collection includes both pro-abolition and pro-slavery newspapers that carried lively debates on their pages.

That is the strength of what Clarke is doing, Whitledge said. Small community papers that might otherwise have decayed now have new life online for researchers. Their work preserves history for future generations.

The online collection also includes various newspaper publishing runs—from the sole known issue of the Breckenridge Clarion from Sept. 17, 1908 to over a century of the Clare Sentinel from 1896-1999.

These small papers provide greater detail into local citizens' lives, Casaceli noted. They introduce people who played vital roles in early community years but are forgotten today.

In her community, this included Elijah Fish who founded Birmingham’s First Presbyterian Church and supported abolitionist causes and the Underground Railroad.

They learned about people like Fish not just from supportive newspapers but also from opponents’ stories. Sometimes reports in abolitionist papers were confirmed by events mentioned in pro-slavery papers.

“The more nuggets we get...the more we can say ‘The story was probably correct,’” she said.

Ten years ago, finding out about Fish would have been needle-in-a-haystack work. The digitization of Pontiac's newspapers brought Elijah Fish back into historical awareness via keyword search.

“We would have never known about Elijah Fish,” Casaceli stated.

Casaceli has pieced together narratives of the Underground Railroad in Oakland County from various newspaper accounts over decades it was active—a project made possible by Clarke’s digitized newspaper collection and now involving libraries and historical societies across Oakland County.

“What started off as a newspaper project led to a huge countywide project,” Casaceli said.

There is now a website introducing many individuals discovered through her research; efforts are underway with curriculum specialists to incorporate these findings into local history education for students across the county.

Digitization is critical for historical research preservation while maintaining microfilm ensures public records aren’t lost if original copies deteriorate.

Since 2016, there has been considerable demand for services like those offered by Clarke Historical Library’s digitized newspaper collection—generating over 8 million hits since then with 2.4 million between July 2022 and June 2023 alone.

“It’s a snowball that keeps growing,” Whitledge concluded.