Hats!

My project at the Marquette County Historical Society has officially started: with HATS.

Yesterday and today, Joanie and I have been working on getting things organized for the project. We decided to start with hats because there are a ton of them, they were easily accessible, and they don't require as much effort as trying to sort through all of the clothing and rearrange that. So yesterday, we cleared out space in one of the upstairs rooms of the exhibit house where our organization project will mostly be taking place. Then, we sat down and discussed our game plan: what we needed to get still and how our project would move forward.

Today the real work began. We started by going through the boxes of hats and determining if they had a label or not. All items should have a label that looks something like "A-73-9-2-1", the "A" standing for "artifact", the first number being the year it was recorded, and the other numbers referring to month/day and the number of the item that day. The problem with the hats is that many of them (more than half of about 100 hats) do not have labels. We put all of the ones without labels into separate boxes to go through later. The ones that did have labels, we had to determine whether or not the label would stay on. For the ones that need their label attached better, we cleaned and photographed them, and then set them into a box for re-labeling. For the ones that the label was sewn in or properly stuck on, we cleaned, photographed, and recorded into a spreadsheet. This last group is almost ready for storage; all we have left to do is wrap them in tissue or cloth and box them, labeling the sorted box.

One big problem we have run into is that many of the hats have been damaged due to improper storage. As the historical society is volunteer-run and they rely on donations of community members, there have not been the appropriate resources for storing many of their items. Hats that we deem "questionable" have been placed in a separate box. These hats have either been damaged by bugs, been crushed beyond repair, or are in a general state of disrepair that cannot be fixed. One very cute hat had a mud dauber house inside of it, and was all full of holes.

Below are some of the photos I took today. Joanie will be touching them up in Photoshop to get rid of stuff in the background and weird shadows.