Internship: The Significance of Displaying Insignificant Histories

By Hawraa Chreim

As part of my internship at the Massachusetts State Archives, I have had the opportunity to curate an exhibit solely based on my research in the institution’s collection. I ultimately landed on my topic while shadowing my supervisor Caitlin Ramos on a research request of prison records from the 1940s. I got swept up in the intrigue of learning about the individual stories concerning prison inmates. My focus shifted directly to incarcerated women in the early 1900s. What were the charges against them? What were prison standards for women of the time? What were their stories? These were the main questions that shaped my initial research. Slowly analyzing case files from the boxes of the Framingham State’s Prison, I finally landed on a file that spoke to me.

Mary Shanks became the focus of my exhibit. A woman who had no significant meaning in history, who largely would’ve been forgotten, had now become the center of my research at the Massachusetts Archives. Looking through her file, I had to be very analytical in my research. The files consisted of hundreds of pages that included: indictments, medical records, family history, correspondence, and photographs. The physical fragility of the documentation was one of my greatest difficulties in working with this collection. Mary’s records covered mainly the years between 1920 and 1930. Assumed to never be reopened, the documents were on thin parchment and the letters were in barely torn envelopes, looking as if they had not been touched since they had been written. With every turn and page adjustment, I had to be very careful in order to retain the integrity of the documents and I felt inspired by holding history in my own hands.

Deciding how to tell Mary Shanks’ story, however, was the real challenge. Mary Shanks had one challenging life. Born in Fall River, she was raised by her parents, in poverty and neglect.  Like many women in her situation, Mary took up domestic work in her hometown. She married in 1919 but her life took a turbulent turn. Over the next decade, Mary and her husband were in and out of jail. Letters between the two, while Mary was incarcerated, reveal that their tumultuous relationship took an unfortunate toll on her mental state.

As a researcher, Mary was a tricky subject as the crime she was indicted for had no specific meaning. Poor women from lower classes were often defined as “guilty” of the crime of “Idle and disorderly”; this could mean disorderly conduct, begging, homelessness, or prostitution, for example. I felt inclined to be the narrator of her life and offer her a chance for the world to see her as a person who struggled with the harsh standards set for women in the early 20^th century, not just as a woman who was incarcerated. Information about her and her family’s mental histories and medical records could have voiced an entirely new perspective. Yet, due to the state laws and common ethics in archival practice, releasing any information about a person’s medical history is illegal. Thus, I put myself in Mary’s shoes and focused instead on her story through the years of her incarceration.  

The documentation in Mary’s files is extensive and illuminates the relationship between her, her husband and daughter, and her extended family. To create a dynamic exhibit, I worked with Caitlin to find material on her incarceration beyond the documents in Mary’s prison record. We discovered the blueprint map of the Framingham State Prison when it was first built, the marriage certificate and birth certificates, photographs of prisoners at the time of Mary’s incarceration, and prison visitation records, to name a few. The goal now had become how to tell Mary’s story within the framework of her incarceration using as many different forms of archival media and records as possible. I wanted to show the range of the collection that was held within the archives repository while simultaneously telling the story of Mary Shanks. I hope visitors to the exhibit will be able to connect to the story of Mary and her life, and that the letters, photos, and documents humanize her. Who is Mary and why is her story important?