Digitizing Missouri's German Heritage

FAIN: PY-258694-18

Missouri Humanities Council (St. Louis, MO 63103-2269)
Caitlin Yager (Project Director: June 2017 to August 2019)

A two-day digitization event in Hermann, Missouri, and subsequent outreach programs focused on German-American heritage in the region. Digitized items would be made available to the public through the Missouri Humanities Council’s German Heritage Project and a digital publication. The project would focus on the digitization of artifacts, documents, and photographs relating to German and German-American culture in the German Heritage Corridor, a stretch along the Missouri River Valley spanning 17 counties in largely rural areas of Missouri.

This project seeks to digitize publically-held artifacts, documents, and photographs related to Missouri’s German Heritage. Inspired by Gottfried Duden’s Report of a Journey to the Western States of North America (1829), which compares the beauty of the Missouri River Valley to that of the Rhineland in Germany, a steady migration of Germans immigrated to Missouri beginning in the late 1820s and continuing until World War I. A number of these immigrants settled in an area that has been designated (officially) the “German Heritage Corridor of Missouri.” The focus of this project will be a two-day digitization event in June 2018, which will preserve photos, heirlooms, and documents collected by families in and around the corridor. Following the digitization, MHC will host a public outreach program featuring a scholar-led interpretation and presentation of the findings of the digitization event as well as some of the larger efforts of MHC to understand Missouri’s unique German heritage.