New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
State museum wraps up COVID history project
Everyone in Connecticut has a story (or a dozen) of how the COVID-19 pandemic affected them. A select few will now have those memories recorded as part of a newly completed archive of the period.
The Connecticut Museum of Culture and History, formerly known as the Connecticut Historical Society, has finished a twoyear project of collecting pandemic-related oral histories and artifacts, some of which will be digitized and all of which will be preserved as a lasting record of the COVID era.
“We have everything from elected officials to people experiencing homelessness,” said Ilene Frank, the museum’s deputy executive director. “It’s a range of viewpoints, and I’m really happy about that.”
In total, the museum collected 73 interviews spanning more than 64 hours of audio, as well as hundreds of artifacts, including empty vaccinevials, signs warning of social distancing restrictions and a plush Dr. Anthony Fauci doll that was made in Connecticut.
The project, launched with a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, focused particularly on vulnerable communities whose experiences are sometimes lost or overshadowed in the historical record. After initially targeting Hartford, Norwich and New Haven, it soon expanded to include interviews with people in 22 towns across the state.
About two dozen of the interviews are currently available online for anyone who wants to listen, and Frank said the full collection will soon be published on a new site. On Saturday, the museum will host an event marking the end of the project, which will include a panel of people interviewed about their experiences.
Abbie Cowan, who started on the project as an intern and now works fulltime at the museum, conducted many of the interviews now in the archive. Her favorites, she said, include a conversation with a New Haven woman who braved COVID as her partner fought cancer and her son struggled with remote learning, as well as a group interview with Hartford teenagers whose high school years were disrupted in ways she could hardly believe.
Cowan said she was surprised how much interview subjects seemed to benefit from sharing their stories.
“At the end, people would thank us,” she said.
“One comment we got was, ‘That was so therapeutic, thank you so much, I didn’t realize how much I needed this.”
Though the museum will no longer be collecting COVID oral histories and artifacts moving forward, it has received federal funding to continue conducting interviews about contemporary life in Connecticut, with an emphasis on “unsung heroes or community change-makers” in towns across Connecticut,” Frank said.
Shiela Hayes, then president of the Norwich NAACP chapter, was one of the first people interviewed for the COVID history project and will appear on the museum’s panel Saturday. In an interview Thursday, she said she appreciates that the museum recorded the stories of regular Connecticut residents, not only prominent or wealthy ones.
“This project really sought to gather the histories of ordinary, everyday people,” she said, “and gather it across different cross-sections and different regions of the state.”
Hayes, who last year was elected to Norwich’s city council, lamented that most people didn’t know what they were in for when COVID first hit four years ago. Part of why she agreed to be interviewed for the oral history project, she said, was so that future generations facing a crisis will have a record to look back on for guidance.
“I looked at it as an opportunity, that this will outlast my lifetime,” she said. “Hopefully in 100 years from now, if another pandemic happens, people will listen and learn from some of the experiences that we didn’t know we were going to go through.”
Over two years of collecting interviews, staff at the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History noticed a shift in attitudes about the COVID era. Whereas people had once been anxious to share their memories, at a certain part they seemed reluctant to revisit the worst of the pandemic.
Frank said she knew it was time to wind down the project when people the museum approached for interviews began to turn down the chance to share.
But even if many Connecticut residents aren’t anxious at the moment to think about COVID, Frank said, dozens of memories will be preserved for whenever they do.
“We want people to know that this stuff is out there,” she said. “And even if they don’t have a desire to see it now, we want it recorded and documented that this is now a part of the collection.”