This started out as just a fun postcard I bought for fifty cents, intending to send it to my cousin. We had been to this train station together a zillion years ago when I visited him living just over the border in Kentucky. Like “Haha, remember that cool building and also there’s a librarian involved.” but then I wondered… The paucity of name/address, the possible double entendre message (from a woman), what else could I find out here? And then, along the way, it became another goofy “librarian vs. LLM” story which I will mostly spare you. But first, Miss Crabb.
I started the way I usually would, some broad DuckDuckGo/Google searches on her last name and “library” and the town she worked in. I learned that Berea, Kentucky just had a county library system, so there was no “Berea Public Library” there, though there was one in Ohio. There was a famous Dr. Crabb who spoke at the Kentucky Library Association but that wasn’t her. One chance hit in a yearbook from 1941 held at the Internet Archive gave me a location, Berea College, and a full name, Nellie I. Crabb. It also let me know that she wrote poetry.
A search of special collections at Berea confirms that she worked in the library at Berea, a Carnegie Library. Berea is notable for being the first integrated co-ed college in the South. bell hooks worked there. A history of the library (which mentions Nellie Crabb but didn’t show up in my special collections search) goes into great detail about their traveling library program.
I tried to follow the poetry lead, to see if she was published in more places than just the college yearbook. This led me to a 1946 volume of Mountain Life, a journal published by the Appalachian South Folklife Center which had a very small “about our contributors” section stating “NELLIE CRABB is a New Englander, born in Connecticut, educated at Northfield [which?], and was librarian at Worcester for a number of years, before coming to the Berea library about fifteen years ago. She is the author of several volumes of poetry including Four Gardens and Seeking.” I emailed the archivist from Northfield Mount Hermon (formerly Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies) who confirmed that she attended there from 1906 through 1912 and she was the class poet of her graduating class. Such a gift!
Turns out her book publication was front page news in the local newspaper.
That gave me corroboration of a lot of facts, enough to:
- find her book on Worldcat (did I order it from ILL? Of course I did) though it doesn’t have a mention of any other books except a book she wrote about her ancestors
- find her likely genealogy (authoritative? not enough for Wikipedia but it matches another one I found which is fine for this project; her mom there was named Ida which is her middle name, so it’s good enough for me)
- find one of her poems which seemed to also support the “maybe this was a double entendre” read of the postcard, but it’s history so that will likely always remain unknown)
Once I got that far, with a full name, job, and birth date, it was easier to figure out that the Berea Special Collections and the Berea Archives were different “places” online. The Archives have several photographs of the library staff and I found pictures from her from 1910 through 1948. She was not in the yearbooks from 1949 onward.
She was a birdwatcher, a film buff, a peace lover.
I felt that I’d found enough, but I always try to use all the resources that I have available. I asked Deepseek to tell me more about Nellie Crabb. It told me a great story, too bad a lot of it wasn’t true. I went to sleep last night wondering if I’d gotten it wrong. I woke up this morning being pretty sure I hadn’t. I checked Deepseek’s “sources” (but did not ask any other librarians to help me with that stupid task) and after a few “It’s pretty simple to verify this part isn’t true” discoveries, (actually she did publish a book, actually she did not have the 1957 yearbook dedicated to her) I stopped wasting my own time and I won’t waste yours by recounting more of it. We know how LLMs work.
Nellie Crabb mostly drops out of the searchable record when she stops working at Berea. According to sources that I think are correct, she lived over thirty more years after her retirement. She may have moved back to New England. She had two siblings but no named partner or children. She’s not on Find A Grave. I didn’t find an obit in any newspapers that I had access to. I can only imagine how that postcard made its way to a thrift store in rural Vermont. I had an enjoyable few hours using my real, human eyeballs to learn about this real, human person and thinking about the nature of research.
ETA: I hope this doesn’t sound braggy, I think many librarians could replicate this process. However, I’m less sure that many non-library types would bother. The total number of search boxes I think I used for this was fourteen (Duckduckgo, Google, Internet Archive, Berea Library catalog, Berea Special Collections, Berea Archives, Google Books, Worldcat, Family Search, Find A Grave, Newspapers.com, Wikipedia, Hathi Trust, Legacy.com)
ETA 2: I’ve received more information from my friend Kristen that she actually retired in 1962, moved back to Massachusetts, probably Auburn, was the oldest member of her Lutheran church and died in a nursing home in Oxford, Massachusetts in 1986.
Thanks for showing your work on how you investigate people born and gone before the common era of computers. I do wonder how this type of research will change for people who have almost exclusively born-digital records? I suppose it depends how much of their lives get slurped up by which entities, and how they’re stored. I would like to be auto-deleted when I die, but I’ve probably been written up in the newspaper and town meeting minutes too many times for that to happen.
I wonder SO MUCH about that. The only way I was able to “fact check” the facts I found was because I knew they were from print materials and thus unlikely to be tampered with etc. The way LLMs are like “Well I looked this up in these*general* places…” and if it’s talking about something you know a lot about, you realize they’re not really “looking things up” at all. I always knew that, but this experience drove it home in an all-new way. The iterative idea of research… getting a bit more info and then using that to now refine how you’re looking into a thing, that’s a useful skill and while it still applies to born-digital thing, I bet new strategies will start showing up once we do get to the people whose entire lives (or the lookuppable parts) are digital.
I like hearing research stories like that – and I often think, as a former (mainframe) programmer, that these kinds of searches of _might_ be further automated, but by something like a “crawler” that builds searches from information or links in other searches and shows you a compilation of the results, and its search path – but without the pseudo-reasoning that LLMs supposedly do.
My wife does quite a bit of genealogical research as part of her writing of history, and it’s amazing how many time she has to stop, examine everything, figure out what’s true and what’s not, or disentangle five generations of people (usually men) all with the same name. I don’t think LLMs are the tool for that kind of thing.
That’s really true, Tim. I like how FamilySearch has sort of “canonical” versions of a person which can be verified by documents so if you find new information, you can add them to an existing profile. That sort of thing could be somewhat automated (and then maybe reviewed or flagged by humans). I think the days of this sort of “crate digging” are numbered but I am curious to see what sort of process replaces it.
I love this! I decided to look up the ghosts in our house when we moved in since we were in the middle of a covid spike and I wondered if anybody had died of 1918 flu in our house. (Yup!) Plus ancestry was free remotely for BK library cardholders at the time. I got pretty far with address searching in their databases and via that same method found my own family ghosts and name changes that nobody ever talked about. The last time I looked up a friend’s house, the results were muddier though because ancestry LLM use seems to be a mess. I found some interesting stuff by looking up commercial addresses where our ghosts had worked. Did you try that?
A day or two ago I learned that I was related (by a marriage) to a nearly-impeached and almost certainly corrupt Federal Judge, named Corneiius Holgate Hanford. He has a wikipedia page. His grandson married my grandmother’s sister. The Hanford Nuclear Reservation was named after him, by way of a town he’d established there, prior to the Manhattan Project. His uncle was someone named John C. Holgate, a very early pioneer of Seattle, but by way of Oregon. This got me to wondering if this prominent John C. Holgate was the namesake of Portland, Oregon’s Holgate Boulevard. It appears not. The most authoritative source I’ve found says it was named after an E. T. Holgate. Searches on that name lead me to someone named Edwin Thayer Holgate, son of a prominent Judge from Corvallis. Edwin Thayer Holgate, besides being the son of a judge, was most famous for three things: a) he was the victim of an attempted bank robbery by an ex-minister; he married a woman named Winifred L Cole; and c) two years later, he died when the gold rush ship he was a passenger on hit a rock and sank near Skagway, Alaska. When I consulted an LLM about who Holgate Boulevard was named after, it made up completely fanciful, verifiably untrue answers. Most of the things I found were credible Find-a-Grave genealogies, or printed in the Oregonian or Oregon Journal (available through the historical Oregonian database, from MultCoLib). E. T. and John appear to be unrelated, meaning I can’t claim any connection to the boulevard. John died a violent death before he was 40 as part of a war between competing silver mines in SW Idaho.