News and History from Heritage Hall
When Dr. Katerberg, the curator of the archives, asked me to write a blog post about what I do here at Heritage Hall, he suggested I use a restaurant analogy, with a ‘front-of-house’ and ‘back-of-house’ divide. I’ve waited tables in past summers, and I’ve gotten …
The previous blog post by John Meyer told the story of his growing interest in Dutch American history, culture, and language. This post continues his story, focusing on his work on the Van Raalte collections of Heritage Hall. A Dutch pastor, Van Raalte led the …
You never know where a story is going to take you. One that I read as a child led me to a digitization project in the Heritage Hall Archives at Calvin University. Now I am working on the collections associated with Albertus C. Van Raalte, …
When I was a child, my cousin sent me a postcard from Peru, where he was working at the time. It wasn’t the first postcard I’d received, but it was the one that sparked in me an interest in collecting postcards from around the world, …
In November 1918, young George Faber sent a postcard home to Michigan from Russia. He was part of the 339th Infantry Regiment and American Expeditionary Force, North Russia that intervened in the Russian civil war after the communist revolution of 1917. It was known as …
Origins Online? Why? I am a digital person. I have a blog and several social media accounts. But I remember when life was analog. I learned to type on a manual typewriter in the early 1980s. In college I wrote papers and an undergraduate thesis …