Executive Director's Report
| Publication year | 2010 |
| Pages | 0269 |
| Citation | Vol. 71 No. 4 Pg. 0269 |
KEITH B. NORMAN
Dr. Edwin C. Bridges, ADAH director
A Real Treasure - Alabama Department of Archives and History
Several months ago, I was introduced to a young man from Brazil. He was visiting the U.S. to conduct research for his doctoral thesis dealing with former Confederate soldiers who migrated to Mexico following the Civil War. The Brazilian scholar was conducting research at the Alabama Department of History and Archives (ADAH). After finishing his historical research there, he was to continue his research in Georgia at the University of Georgia and in North Carolina at the University of North Carolina and Duke University. His visit to Alabama and the ADAH was very telling about the importance of this state agency. Here was a foreign scholar who was conducting historical research in the document collections of three major universities in Georgia and North Carolina while in Alabama he was utilizing the resources of ADAH. For some, this might come as a surprise. But, for those who know about its extensive holdings, the ADAH is a treasure trove of historical artifacts and information.
The ADAH was created in 1901 as the nation's first publicly funded and independent state archives agency. See Sections 41-6-1 et seq., Code of Alabama (1975). Thanks largely to the efforts of its founder and first director Thomas McAdory Owen, the ADAH flourished and served as the inspiration for other states that soon followed with similar agencies of their own. Following his untimely death in 1920, Thomas Owen's wife, Marie Bankhead Owen, was appointed by the department's board of trustees to succeed her late husband. She headed ADAH for the next 35 years, becoming only the second woman to head a state agency. Through her political savvy, Marie Owen, a member of the well-known and politically powerful Bankhead family1 , successfully secured funds from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration to complete the Alabama War Memorial Building which, upon its completion, housed the ADAH's growing collections and its offices and still does today.
Among the ADAH's extensive holdings are military records dating as far back as the American Revolution, online records that include a Civil War soldiers database, a World War I database, online indexes covering local government records on microfilm, newspapers on microfilm, maps, and an Alabama church and synagogue records collection...
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