Gaithersburg Community Museum Internship: The Beginnings

The Beginnings

Hello! My name is Brett, and I am a senior at UMBC! This spring semester I have been interning at the Gaithersburg Community Museum. The two main projects I am helping with are cataloging artifacts and preparing and designing the exhibit for the upcoming Census Day event on April 1, 2020. Additionally, I help with odds and ends at the museum, whether it be filling in at the front desk when someone is out, or interacting with patrons. The museum is a small museum in the center of Old Towne Gaithersburg. It resides in an old train station which played an influential role in the development of the city. Additionally, it has three old train cars and a plaza out front. The museum is owned by the City of Gaithersburg and conducts many events at the museum and the plaza out front. 

I work with Joanna Church to catalog artifacts using the PastPerfect software. So far our work has included separating image files within PastPerfect to make them more easily searchable. For the Census Day event, I conducted research at the Montgomery History Library. Searching through census data was both challenging and rewarding. The most difficult part is deciding who was considered Gaithersburg before the city was incorporated. In order to do this, I had to learn more about the history of Gaithersburg and which families were influential. Using these families as a guideline, I did my best to tally up the numbers of free and enslaved people living in Gaithersburg before the 1870s. 

My numbers may not be perfectly accurate, but the practice of history is really educated guesswork, right? Though it was somewhat tedious to comb through all the rough data, it was exciting as well. For instance, in researching, I learned about a free black woman living in Montgomery County in the early to mid-1800s who named herself Anarchy. This was an interesting find among the records. A less exciting but still interesting piece of information I learned through this research was that many of the large families that built the city were slave owners with dozens of enslaved people working their land. This was not a shock necessarily but we tend to think about slavery as a faraway distant part of history, but the truth is that Maryland and even small communities like Gaithersburg are stained with the legacy of slavery.

This image is a copy of one of the Census documents I used for research.