About two years ago, the Carrboro Board of Aldermen began seeking a volunteer citizen to act as the town historian in addition to the town poet laureate, said Julie Eckenrode, the assistant to the town manager and manager of the Carrboro Oral History Project.
When it was realized what a large job town historian would be for a volunteer, Mayor Lydia Lavelle thought of narrowing it down to oral history.
“Oral history allows us to capture the stories and the voices of people whose experiences might not otherwise be included in the historical record,” said Rachel Seidman, the acting director of UNC’s Southern Oral History Program.
The SOHP helped train interviewers for Carrboro’s project, and Carrboro will also be depositing their oral histories into SOHP’s database, Eckenrode said.
Seidman said oral history can change the way people look at the past.
“We can ask questions about things that are sometimes hard to get from printed or written sources, so oral history allows us to ask questions about emotions and how a particular moment in time felt,” Seidman said.
Junior Adrienne Bonar is helping to run the Carrboro project. This past summer she was a Moxie Scholar, part of a program between Carolina Women’s Center and the Southern Oral History Program. Usually each scholar gets placed with a nonprofit, but since Carrboro was interested in doing their own oral history program, Bonar was placed with them.
“What I did was put together the website — the page for the Oral History Project — and went through the Southern Oral History archives and went through anything that was relevant to the Town of Carrboro,” Bonar said. “I also did my own oral history interviews with four of the alderwomen.”
