Senior Seminar Students Bring Local Archives to Life

The presentations were the culmination of a semester of work in the archives as part of the course led by History Department Chair and Jarzavek Teaching Chair Ben Leeming P’17, ’19, ’21, ’23. The Honors History Seminar is two semesters of high-level independent research. In the fall, students complete an honors thesis about a topic of their choosing. In the spring, the course is titled “Native New England: Recovering Lost Voices in the Archive” and focuses on primary source research in the Framingham History Center, intended to bring much-needed attention to the presence of Black and Indigenous people in local history. To that end, students’ projects are required to be publicly accessible. 

Students used a finding aid titled “Framingham’s People of Color: 1600–1800” to navigate the collections of the Framingham History Center and select documents to study and analyze. Their projects shared the goal of eliminating silences (defined as gaps in historical knowledge) and increasing access to Black and Indigenous colonial history, which has been underrepresented in the documented history of the region.

The partnership with the center arose in 2024 in part through Leeming’s personal interest in local history. 

“I myself had been exploring the Framingham History Center and getting to know the archive, so I decided last year to just create a project for the seniors utilizing their resources,” he said.

What started as just a unit within the course in 2024 was expanded this year to be a semester-long project that builds competency and methodology in handling and working with primary sources through classroom and on-site components. “A lot of the class is dedicated to understanding archives, cataloguing, getting to know the collection,” Leeming explained. 

Bonnie Mitchell, outreach collections and archives manager at the Framingham History Center, said the work the class has done in understanding how to handle historical documents really paid off. “It was amazing to us how skillfully the students handled the documents and the archives,” she said.

Students’ final projects, crafted with the public in mind, ranged from websites to lesson plans to finding aids.

Adalia Wen ’25 researched the notes of Otis Johnson, a Framingham resident in the nineteenth century who kept copious notes on local history in preparation for writing his own account of Framingham’s past. In her research, Wen attempted to piece together Johnson’s motivations and context for writing his histories, paying special attention to information he gathered about Black and Indigenous residents of the town.

Ceci Giebutowski ’25 and Nicole Marandet ’25 both researched a play that aimed to dramatize an account of the “Coming of the First White Settlers to Framingham,” created in the mid-twentieth century as an educational resource for children. 

Giebutowski analyzed the biased and outdated language in the play and offered an alternative interpretation based on current research and reflecting a more balanced perspective. Marandet sought to contextualize the play in the history of mid-twentieth-century education and highlight the ways history has been used to advance political agendas.

Andrew Ho ’25 and Mairin Anderson ’25 each attempted to trace the histories and movements of different Framingham families—one enslaved and one enslaver—based on surviving documentation held at the Framingham History Center archive.

In completing their projects and building their competency with the primary source material, students had the opportunity to combine old and new technologies. Justin Jang ’25 and Aly Correia ’25 worked together to create a web resource of transcribed land deeds that document the transfer of land from Indigenous (Nipmuc) families to colonists between 1729 and 1772 in the areas that are now Framingham and Natick. 

Correia took an interest in paleography, which is the art of deciphering the handwriting of old manuscripts, and transcribed documents by hand. Jang, on the other hand, was curious about how new technology could aid in the transcription process. Jang used subscription-level ChatGPT to create an initial transcript based on images of the documents he and Correia took in the archive. Then he proofread and hand-edited each of the transcripts against the original documents. You can view their work at the site Framingham Land Deeds.

Following their final presentations in May, students responded to questions from the audience. Many were curious about the role of AI in the research process. 

“I think AI is going to be a critical part of historical research when it has human oversight,” said Jang, who speculated that resisting AI could lead to more gaps in historical knowledge in the future. 

Wen, too, commented on the ease of AI in assisting her transcription work with the notes of Otis Johnson. “I transcribed half by hand and half with AI,” she said. “There was a lot of information to parse through, but transcribing it makes the archive easier to comb through.” 

Leeming and his partners at the Framingham History Center are pleased with the collaboration and enthusiastic about expansion.

“I hope eventually there will be more opportunities to get students over there during the school day,” said Leeming, who is in the process of building a summer internship program with the center. “I’m hoping there is a way to scale it so more students can have this experience.”