Last month, I flew to Seattle to visit the Filipino American National Historical Society's National Pilipino Archives (and to visit my aunties, uncles, and cousins).
It was my first research trip since successfully defending my candidacy examination and dissertation proposal. It felt legit!
From shelves of boxes of newspapers and other material, I took so many photos. They gave me the perfect chance to try Tropy, an open-source software that organizes photos of archival material. (I first heard of Tropy through the Drafting the Past podcast.)
I love Tropy. It has a way of collating the individual photos of individual pages of a document, so it's better than opening multiple windows of dozens of photos. It's like Apple's Photos app on macOS, but it also has fields to store metadata that researchers care about, like the name of the collection that a document is part of or the copyright permissions.
FANHS National is actually located in the basement of an old Catholic school, the same Catholic school that Executive Director and Co-Founder Dorothy Cordova attended when she was a child.
It felt like an honor to meet Auntie Dorothy, to enter the room where her and her late husband's collections have been stored, and to look at the material that has been cited in so many other historians' work. Actually, that's how I first heard of FANHS. It was listed in historical monographs and their acknowledgements and references pages.
I'm grateful that my research trip was funded by the Turner-Schulman Graduate Fellowship from Penn's Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, & Immigration, so I wanted to make the most of my time. I tried to budget time for writing, thinking, sightseeing... and of course, visiting my family. I hadn't seen my cousins since 2019.
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