“Go to the Attics, the Closets, and the Basements”: Black Women’s Intergenerational Practices of Memory Keeping in Oxford, Ohio

Abstract

In 1993, eighty-nine-year-old Jennie Eunice Elder Suel, from Oxford, Ohio, donated a collection of personal and family documents to Miami University’s Walter Havighurst Special Collections. This article examines the Jennie Elder Suel Collection and the actions made by multiple generations of Black women, who chose to preserve their history. The first section traces the development of Suel’s collection and the way in which it is preserved in local archives today. The second section situates the Suel family in a wider context and discusses the archival challenges of recovering the lives and experiences of antebellum Black women in the Midwest, and the following section explores how I have attempted to navigate these challenges through a research method I have innovated called Descendant Archival Practices (DAP). The remainder of the article offers a careful analysis of Black women’s home-based archives and their implications for understanding nineteenth-century Black women’s motivations for archiving themselves. Part of this assessment includes analyzing which records these women deemed valuable to preserve, revealing the inner lives of Black women and the things they cherished. Through these deliberate and heartfelt choices, Black women ensured their legacy through the preservation of their ancestral history.