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Dear Clara
Life in Iowa service project looks at one woman's letters over 60
years
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Before Eric Jennings participated in the Life in Iowa program, service
to the community was far from his mind.
"I never was motivated to go out and do something 'selfless' for
people," Jennings says. "The Life in Iowa program pushes you
to do just that."
Each Life in Iowa student is required to have a service learning component
to their overall project. In Jennings' case, the history major spent the
summer months in Decorah working with the Vesterheim Museum.
Service learning projects are developed in cooperation with the County
Extension Education Director from the county where the student will complete
their project. Life in Iowa service learning students spend 10 hours per
week devoted to a community-building service project.
For his service learning project, Jennings developed a computer database
for indexing the historical correspondence of the Jacobson family, a local
farm family who settled in Decorah in the 1850s from Norway.
A majority of the correspondence is in the form of letters written to
Clara Jacobson, a schoolteacher who lived and taught throughout the Midwest.
Jacobson also was an accomplished writer and avid photographer.
"The Jacobsons are a good example of an immigrant family that settled
in Iowa," Jennings said. "There is a vast amount of information
available on this family."
There are about 450 letters written from 1870 to 1930 in addition to four
boxes of other material related to the farm, including maps, legal records
and photographs. The database will be used to update a tour guide training
manual for the Jacobson farm, which was donated to the Vesterheim Museum.
Jennings created a visitor guide booklet for the farm and says the information
gleaned from the correspondence will also be used to create a documentary
on the family and life on an Iowa farm in the 1800s and early 1900s.
But the primary reason Jennings indexed Clara's letters was to provide
a better database for potential researchers.
"Going through the letters you can see the progression of time,"
he said. "Some of the early letters talk about a brother going into
blacksmithing. Later on, the letters talk about automobile repair and
tell individuals that they now have a phone.
"There is a lot of stuff in these letters that can be important to
someone doing research on this era."
A majority of the letters contain references to what is happening in the
daily lives of the authors. Jennings says there are some references to
the world around them, including World War I and how times become harder
during the 1930s.
"An important part of the letters shows the importance of family
to the Jacobsons," Jennings said. "Their Norwegian heritage
is strong in the earlier letters (some letters are written in Norwegian),
but you see the loosening of the cultural ties as the letters go on."
Around LAS
September 8-21, 2003
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