A Journey Through the Orphan Asylum Archives
A First-Time Researcher Gets Lost, and then Finds Herself
At Hard Histories we pull aside the curtain and show the nuts and bolts of historical research—including from the perspective of students like Kamal. – Emma Katherine Bilski
As many of our readers know, the Spring 2023 Hard Histories Lab focused in on the Johns Hopkins Hospital Colored Orphan Asylum (JHH COA). We reviewed the administrative and financial records of the asylum together as a group and individually at the Johns Hopkins Medicine Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives. I was a new and inexperienced historical researcher, both excited and intimidated by the prospect of visiting the Chesney Archives for the first time. Baltimore history has always fascinated me, and the opportunity to delve into primary source material and uncover new insights was too good to pass up. However, I had no idea what to expect or how to go about conducting research in an archive.
To get our group started, Dr. Heather Cooper, the Reexamining Hopkins History archivist, and reference archivist Terri Hatfield helped us get started with a tour of the Chesney Archives as a whole, familiarizing us with the facility and the reading room where we would consult archival materials. We received an overview of the archive’s JHH COA collection and instructions for accessing the materials. I felt welcome and encouraged as a first-time researcher and am especially grateful to Dr. Cooper for recommending useful resources to me, which allowed me to develop a research timeline for the semester.
I began with the JHH COA “post-closure” records: Folders containing expense receipts -- boarding fees, clothing, meals, miscellaneous items, and refunds -- connected to the girls who were supported by the asylum even after it closed in 1914.[1] Poring through these business records eventually allowed me to retrieve, for the first time, the names of children resident in the asylum and eventually became the center of my project: “The Remembrance: The Johns Hopkins Hospital Colored Orphan Asylum and the Girls Who Were Forgotten.”[2] I began by skimming through each folder, becoming more familiar with the materials and determining how to read receipts more closely for individual names. Along the way, I began to understand the ethical concerns connected with learning not only names but snippets of the lives attached to them, something explored in a Hard Histories Substack post from April.
But my first day at the archives concluded just as I was getting started and I had discovered my main challenge: Time. It was easy to get lost in the maze of information and lose track of time. A great deal of patience, persistence, and precision was required when documenting details from such materials. On top of writing down every name that I saw, I made a record of the dates, citations, context, and any relevant notes. This was time-consuming: I hand-wrote the information and then typed it into a shared spreadsheet. I can say now that this was not the most efficient method of note taking. Still, it was good practice for capturing all the details and avoiding any need to go back to specific folders.
My goal was to craft narratives about the children in the orphanage, but it was at first challenging to do so with only expense receipts. During each of my next few visits to the Chesney Archives, I walked into the reading room, pulled my box of post-closure expenses from a shelf, grabbed a folder, and begin taking notes for the next three hours. Through the consistency of this routine, I became more comfortable with the archival material. It felt like I could stay there for the rest of the day after realizing that I could absorb so much information in a short span of time.
Still, on my final day working at the archives I felt a sense of incompleteness that was disconcerting: Had I really made much progress, even after reading through everything available? I worried that the finish line was unreachable. Listening to other students and talking with others researchers, I learned that this is a typical feeling among researchers working with limited materials that do not directly yield the expected conclusions. This process was frustrating, especially for a newcomer like me, so I hoped that the discoveries were worth the effort.
Being new to archival research and visiting the Chesney Archives for the first time was a daunting but ultimately rewarding experience. It gave me a newfound appreciation for the power of primary sources to shape our understanding of this difficult history. I left the experience feeling both humbled and empowered, knowing that I had taken a small step towards uncovering crucial details of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Colored Orphan Asylum, while gaining valuable skills that I could use as I moved forward with the project.
Stay tuned for my upcoming post when I describe how, through archival research, I uncovered the names of over 200 individual children once resident in the JHH COA. In the expense reports, 712 names in total were mentioned, many of them duplicates. Turning to other archival materials, including census records and newspapers, I began to assemble stories of how girls became women and lived and worked after their time at the asylum.
— Kamal Kaur, KSAS ‘25
— Emma Katherine Bilski, Editor
[1] “Series 2. Financial records. 1895-1924,” Records of the Johns Hopkins Colored Orphan Asylum 1895-1924, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Baltimore, MD.
[2] Kamal will tell us more about this project in upcoming Substack post a few weeks from now—stay tuned and make sure to subscribe!