WVRHC Heading into Third Year of WV National Cemeteries Project Collaboration
Posted by Admin.November 8th, 2024
Following Veterans Day this November, the West Virginia & Regional History Center (WVRHC) will have the pleasure of working with West Virginia high school students for the third consecutive year of the West Virginia National Cemeteries Project. The goal of the project, which is funded by the West Virginia Humanities Council, is for students to research veterans who are buried in one of the two national cemeteries located in West Virginia and publish works that tell their stories.
In the first year of the project, students created biographies of many of these veterans, including men and women from different branches of the military, which can be found on the project website. In the second year of the project, the students researched veterans Clifford Condon and Nelson Bickley and contributed to online exhibitions about their lives and service: “The Record Keepers,” about Clifford Condon, and “The Mentor,” about Nelson Bickley.
The role of the WVRHC in the project is to provide hands-on experience with primary sources that reinforce what students are learning from their project advisors. The WVRHC has also scanned related documents from the collections to create a ‘surrogate’ collection that the students could use in their classrooms. This year, we will be hosting students from University High School, in Morgantown, and Grafton High School. Their field trips will bring them into a university library and archive, perhaps for the first time, and introduce them to the foundations of historical research. In small groups, the students will rotate through stations where they will analyze different types of archival material with guidance from the WVRHC and project staff.
This collaboration can spark the interest of the next generation of historical researchers and educate the public about the service members laid to rest in our national cemeteries. This Veterans Day, we encourage you to take a look at the exhibits and biographies online, and we look forward to sharing with you what this year’s students publish!