“I’m looking for my aunt, is there a way I can search for her?” one participant asked Thursday evening at the Northeast Regional Library.
Kaira Tucker, a local history librarian and supervisor at the Main Library, got down to business searching different versions of the aunt’s name. She helped participants with queries like that throughout the class. Over the course of two hours, she presented hundreds of results from a digital search to reveal fragments of Louisville’s past and help uncover stories of Black life that went untold.
Tucker cycled through obituaries, classifieds and society pages in historic Black newspapers like The Louisville Defender and The Louisville Leader. She taught participants what she called “internet magic” with advanced search tools and viewing tips for grainy photos.
As Tucker presented the nuts and bolts of using ProQuest— a costly database service used by students and research professionals — and the Library of Congress websites to find archives of newspaper articles, participant Maurice Sweeney leaned forward, squinting at the screen and taking photos.
Sweeney is hunting through Black newspapers in service of a larger goal. He’s researching for a book. It’s about his father, the prolific Black activist P.O. Sweeney, former chair of the NAACP in Louisville.
Before attending the class, he had already scoured through thousands of pages of archival material from the Library of Congress, nine newspapers and several books hoping it would point him in the right direction.
He was 5 when his father died. After he graduated from college, he took the top off the piano bench in his home and found photos from his father’s scrapbook. He said that sparked a quest to corroborate those mementos with archival materials.
Sweeney said he’s learned a lot about his father: He led the fight to equalize pay between Black and white teachers in the 1940s. He sued the city of Louisville in 1947 so Black people could play on public golf courses. His father’s relative was a plaintiff in the landmark Standard Realty v. Westover in 1942, which eliminated racial deed restrictions and birthed what’s known today as the Chickasaw Neighborhood in west Louisville.
But excavating that history wasn’t simple. Sweeney said he had to hop from library to library to access their collections of various historic Black newspapers. He wishes it were easier.
“A lot of things happened that Dr. Sweeney initiated that people don't even know. You know, we go to parks, we go to things, and we take it for granted. And so, people have always thought it was just about golf. It wasn't about golf. It's about access to public parks,” he said.
Tucker, the librarian and instructor, said she enjoyed the participants’ “eureka” moments.
“Just the feedback of hearing people say, ‘I found my aunt in the newspaper! Oh my gosh, there's a picture of my house,’ or what have you. Those little discoveries are really exciting,”she said.
Tucker said searching through articles from the past is a way for people to get to know more about who they are and their context in the world.
Because of systemic racism, some communities may have less access to search tools and methods of genealogy research,, she said. A lack of internet access and not knowing where to find tools can make it hard for members of marginalized communities to learn more about their family tree and other historical information.
“It is definitely a different approach you're looking at when you're doing genealogy with communities that have experienced, you know, systemic racism. You're not going to find the same level of documentation, she said.
Card holders can browse the digitized newspapers at Louisville Free Public Library branches.
