IN THE LIBRARY WITH BONNY ELWELL

Bonny Elwell, Library Director at the Camden County Historical Society, sat behind the desk speaking to a patron on the phone as I was led in by a co-worker of hers. She finished her call and came around the desk to great me with a smile and a hand shake. The Historical Society building is located at 1900 Park Boulevard in Camden, NJ with a museum, the library, the historic house, and the caretakers’ house all on the property. We go through a short tour of the property including the museum and the historic house, which are both currently closed for renovations. We pass through a breeze way which a handicap entrance was added and into the museum’s first and second floor. Everywhere you look there are original pieces and sections showing the history of Camden County. Once back into the library we sit at a table along the side next to one of the library’s shelves of records.

Christoph: What is your typical day-to-day?

Bonny Elwell: So we have a lot of visitors come in, usually people either researching history or genealogy. Don, one of our volunteers right now, is helping with a genealogy request for people who are unable to visit. Looking for obituaries, marriage information, where people live, burial location, things like that. Usually we get a lot of genealogists come in, right now it’s a little slow. Yesterday I think we had 6 people come in. So what I’ll do is assist them with locating our records. We have quite a bit of obituaries, we have a data base with over 220,00 names of deaths, obituaries, burial records, etc. in Camden County.

Is that all online?

No it is not online. It is a computer database indexing what we have here physically in our collection. For instance obituaries found in newspapers that we have on microfilms. It’s a lot of physical records.

One thing we do use online, we have the courier post achieves which cover from 1949 to present. That’s the only portion that’s been digitized, from 1949 to present. For the recent years we search that way. For the older years, the physically compiled database is the way we can locate obituaries and so forth.

Our city directories are used a lot, they cover from 1839 to 1947, so that’s a broad range of city directories. From that point we pick up with telephone books from 1940’s to 1998.

It’s crazy how media has changed and how it’s all been kept. Just looking at some of these, the bibles there.

We have family bible records from the 1700’s, as far as one of the earlier that ways people kept genealogy records.

I notice Robert and Mary Cooper Kaighn (on the one bible there).

Coopers, Kaighns, both very common names from the early days. Kaighn Avenue is named after the the Kaighns. This was a Cooper house; it was Joseph Cooper who built it, Marmaduke Cooper who added on the addition. These are long time names of Camden.

As far as the history and the museum, do you have records, do assist with or do any tours?

Normally the museum and the historic house are open for tours. We have individuals coming to tour, we have people interested in architecture, and we have school groups come tour. I don’t do as much with that, but we do have researchers come in to research local history not just genealogy. So they might want to know about historic houses in Camden, or they might want to know about the history about a racetrack or the history of a restaurant. Even things like information on the race riots of the 1970s. So I’ll assist them with that kind of information.

Here in the library we have also have documents, published books, pamphlets, other manuscript archival material that would be useful for people researching any kind of topic.

Yesterday we had someone looking up World War II ration books, another thing we have here in our WWII files.

Your files encompass all of Camden County, but being in Camden you must have a lot on the city itself.

We have Camden City items but we also have items from the rest of the county

Because of the population concentration we probably have an equal amount of Camden City items, and the rest of the county items.

We have an aisle of Camden County manuscripts, and an aisle of Camden City manuscripts, the fact that those are fairly even in content gives you an idea.

I saw on your website about the Underground Railroad and its relevance in south Jersey program.

So that is our educational program we take as a suitcase program to schools, and that is a particular program.

This was not an Underground Railroad site; this was actually a slavery site. Marmaduke Cooper owned slaves. We talk quite a bit about that in the story of Pomona hall as well as in the museum.

We are actually working on turning the caretakers house into an African American exhibit.

How is your storage facility for the library?

Besides what you see here and all these shelves, underneath this is where the main storage area is and under Pomona hall.

We also, of course, have a large collection of objects.

We have changing exhibits. Were putting up a temporary exhibit.

Once the construction is done, you said later this year right?

Yeah, hopefully. Objects get switched out, for example posters are actually in the object collection.

We had a temporary World War I exhibit this spring, so items pertaining to WWI including posters,  gas masks, and canteens were on exhibit for that.

How long have you been with the historical society?

I have been here 2 years. About 4 years ago we had a water leak and everything was kind of closed down. About 2 years ago, when I started here, everything kind of got re-opened at that same time because things were halted.

It wasn’t like a full collection was lost, it was more along the lines of the physical building had to be refurbished.

Is there any one thing you enjoy the most?

I love helping people research.

Another thing I’ve been doing is putting out a couple magazines a year and reinstating the newsletter, I also manage the membership and send out the mailings and the E-mails. I like being able to publish articles and get them out to people.

So, the newsletter is more recent?

Well the newsletter had been started in the 1950’s, actually I think it might date much earlier than that. With the chaos in the last couple years and earlier than that it had fallen off, it had been a while. I was just re-starting it. It was one of those things where were all getting a fresh start and get things rolling again.

Is the newsletter a subscription based program?

The news letter is just for members. Its just 4-8 pages of what’s new in the library and a feature article.

The other thing I’ve been working with is the Camden County History Alliance, pulling together all the historical organizations in the county to work together. That’s another one of my big pet projects.

With the Camden County History Alliance, we’ve been putting out the magazine. The magazine is different, we print out 10,000 of them and we distribute them for free throughout the county to everyone, more of a general public kind of thing. It’s paid for by ads.

Each [article] is submitted by one of the organizations. So that spreads it around the area and allows each organization to contribute.

I’m working on the third edition right now. This is the first edition on schools, the second edition on military. And each organization, like Indian King Tavern, will have them out on their bench when people first come in to pick up.

What is the third edition on? Is it a secret?

No, not a secret at all. Its on transportation in Camden County. So covering stage coach roots, and trains, and balloons, and airplanes.

Thats another of my big projects, other than helping researchers.

I would say on a typical day maybe 3 researchers, heavier days 4-6 which we’ve had a lot of recently. Very heavy days, 12 or something like that. It can get pretty crazy sometimes.

Is there any one moment that you were researching that stuck out to you?

It’s always exciting when someone comes in to research some bit of genealogy and they find exactly what they’ve been looking for all along. Thats always exciting.

It’s like the show, Who Do You Think You Are.

They have all the time to dramatize it and set it up. At the same time I have had experiences that are just as serendipitous and unexpected just naturally so.

This summer I went to Maine on a genealogy road trip for myself. While I was there, in the span of only 30 hours, I found the family land, I found their graves in the cemetery. I broke through what we call a brick wall, in other words a mystery that had never been able to be solved, someone was able to solve it for me. It was not at all what I expected and completely destroyed my theories. I found a cousin. I even found the family homestead for another branch of the family, still standing. I walked around it and found  pile of old books that had been left behind there. Which I opened them up and one belonged to my great great grandmother, it had her name in it.

Did you steal it?

Yes, I did in fact. Then another cousin called and said “Take them, take them, they were supposed to thrown out years ago”, so I was fine.

It was absolutely an incredible experience.

But I see things happen similarly here all the time. It’s just incredible. Things you never could plan.