Researcher has to travel back in time to find information
Ciarra Oxford is youthful and very modern. She teaches online.
But the researcher at the Atlanta Public Library also travels in a very old time. She sometimes has to be in the world that existed 200 years ago. With some referencing points, she’s goes back 300 years.
Oxford admits she doesn’t have an intimate knowledge about this world. And she’s not a native Cass Countian, but when she sits down at her little office desk on the second floor of the library, she has to open the huge, crumbling, leather-edged volumes of the Atlanta mayor’s court going back to 1857.
From there she must read the handwritten and colloquially expressed text of an age ago.
“Some mayor’s fines assessed may be for $1,” Oxford said. “You wonder if that was serious or done for something else.”
Oxford is a researcher and special-projects manager for Atlanta’s library — a position made possible through Americorp.
Her job is to read the 20-30 volumes of the Atlanta mayor’s court going back to the 1800s. Once stored in Atlanta’s City Hall, they were transferred to the library’s genealogical area and now stored in a secure and locked office.
Oxford reads and then transfers the information of what went on daily in the mayor’s court into digital format. That makes it easily searchable.
“The result is that if you have a tiny bit of information about someone, you can search these records, online,which are now in a spreadsheet format. You can find that person and a lot of information about them. It’s what the genealogical people we have coming here really want, and we have a lot of them not just from Cass County. So it’s a great service.”
But not always fun, the researcher said.
“You can get tired of reading and trying to understand. There’s just so much. Months and years of work here. One has to do something else during the work day, so I’m glad to help the library in other capacities here. In all, it’s a lot of fun.”
Oxford, an English major who graduated from Texas State University in San Marcos in 2015, began working at Atlanta’s library last summer as a participant with the AmeriCorps ViSTA volunteer program.
“We pay a small part of her salary, and her primarily job is to help the library increase its capacity to meet our patron needs, “said Atlanta Librarian Jackie Icenhower.
“I’m not primarily a researcher, “Oxford said. “My background is in teaching and editing. But I’m interested in languages, so reading these court documents is an example of writing from long ago. It’s literature to me.”