What is History? It's in the eye of the beholder!
There are many ways to define "history", and your definition depends to a large extent on your age and interests. Everyone enjoys looking at photos taken in the 1800s and early 1900s. It's pretty much a given that none of us were around in the 1800s, so that definition is easy. Not many visitors to this site were around in the early 1900s, which makes that period pretty easy to define as "historical".
However, our definition for the purposes of this website is much broader. We define history as a glimpse into daily life, important events, and buildings and other things that existed in the community in various time periods ranging from the 1800s to the present.
We are building this site for people of all ages, both young and old. If you are 40-50 years old, 1980 seems like yesterday. Other than a few outstanding events, you won't find much from the 1980s to be "historical". However, if you are a young adult who is now college age, you weren't born until the latter 1980s, so your perspective of history differs widely from older people's. If you're younger than college age, your definition of history moves up the time line considerably into the 1990s and 2000s.
Therefore, our website will feature photos and stories from all periods of Titus County life. Much of Titus County's history has been lost due to lack of documentation. I shot the photograph of South Jefferson shown in the "Street Scenes" topic in 1973 to document the field of view while investigating and documenting a traffic accident. I wasn't concerned in the least with history, but needed the photo for a court case. Now, 30+ years later, how many people remember the traffic islands and light poles in the middle of South Jefferson? It's also interesting to see both the buildings that were on South Jefferson, and even more, the ones that weren't!
Much of Titus County's history has been lost due to lack of preservation. Another reason that we define "history" so broadly on this website it that the "new" City Hall and fire stations, built in the early 2000s, will be "old" before you realize it. Since public buildings are designed to serve the community for many years, we want to document them while they're new and shiny. Then, in 40 or 50 years when the buildings are old (or maybe gone and replaced by another), people then can see what they looked like "back when". They won't be able to take the photograph, so we will do it for them. They will be just as fascinated by today's town as we are with the town in the 1800s. The same principle applies to other buildings, street scenes, and events that are now commonplace.
Why Did You Post So Many Unfinished Stories?
So Many Stories, So Little Time!
Frankly, the website is moving much slower than we had anticipated or would like for it to. This website is still very much under construction, and will be for several more years. If we were simply creating the articles, like in a single newspaper article or novel, it would be logical to finish one story before we started another.
Perhaps the best way we can answer the question that naturally arises is by giving you a look "behind the scenes" into what goes into writing the articles presented.
It often takes several months to complete a story that you read in a few minutes to an hour. From March, 2007 to March 2008 we averaged working over 10 hours a day doing research, scanning old newspaper articles from microfilm, re-typing them after they were scanned, collecting, scanning and taking photographs, and writing articles.
We try to document facts presented on our website using period newspaper articles of the day, government records, and other historical documents whenever possible. By doing so, we have discovered that many things we've been told all of our lives and that have been written elsewhere as being fact are actually just local legends.
In order to research the facts surrounding the articles we present, we are reading each page of each microfilmed edition of the Mt. Pleasant Daily Times from 1923 to the mid-1960s. We print the important stories to paper, then must scan them using optical character recognition software to convert them to a usable digital format that can be filed, searched, and used on the website.
Most of the papers were poorly photographed when they were converted to microfilm. To make things worse, the old microfilm is in extremely poor condition, and contains many scratches, background speckles, and broken or creased sections. Most doesn't OCR well, and some not at all. Therefore, we must hand-type 50-90% of many stories after they are scanned.
We are researching having the old film properly converted into digital images for the Mt. Pleasant Public Library. This is the only way it can be preserved for years to come without further deterioration. One company that we sent a sample roll for a cost estimate for digital conversion services won't even give us an estimate for OCR work because the film is in such bad shape. They told us that even with their advanced equipment and software that much of it would have to be hand-typed, just like we are having to do, which is completely cost-prohibitive.
We started and plan to complete scanning all of the Mt. Pleasant City Council minutes from 1900 to present, also. This is necessary to document things that happened before the newspapers start in 1923, and also to cross-verify statements printed in the paper. Once we finish them, we plan to digitize the Titus County Commissioner's Court minutes. Many volumes of the Commissioner's Court minutes are hand written, which means they cannot be scanned and must be hand-typed.
The nature of researching historical documents is that the background information needed for many articles are inter-mingled. For example, one issue of the newspaper contains stories about important or interesting people, new buildings, major events, the schools, and almost any other topic you can think of. Likewise, in a single meeting the City Council discusses and may act on several things related to different sections of our website, like the water system, building a new road, or passing ordinances covering different topics.
It takes 4-6 hours to read and print a single roll of microfilm. We have around 200 rolls to search, not counting paper copies of newspapers and historical government documents that have not been microfilmed.
Therefore, it is actually much faster to start many stories at once, print all articles and documents pertaining to them in one pass, and bring the articles along as research permits. Imagine the total time that would be required to go through all 200 rolls of film and other documents to complete one story, then have to do it again for the next story!
When we complete the Mt. Pleasant Public Library's collection of the Mt. Pleasant Daily Times, we plan to digitize the Mt. Pleasant Daily Tribune's microfilm.
It takes a lot of time to locate, borrow, scan, digitally enhance, catalog, and return historic photos to their owners. We use a custom-written computer database to catalog the photos and pertinent notes about them for future reference. We have indexed over 2,300 photos in March, 2008, and this number grows weekly.
In addition to old photos that we scan, we are also traveling the county and have taken several thousand current photos from all over Titus County to include in present articles or for use in upcoming ones. This, too, takes time. Some photos require appointments with the people involved. Outdoor photos are dependent on fair weather, which we can't plan. Many times we must return to a location two or three times to catch the sun in the right position for proper lighting. In addition to our indexed photos, we have taken well over 1,000 that aren't indexed!
Once an article is written as far as historical documentation permits, we must select and resize any supporting photos to be used with it, and lay out the photos and article's text to fit the web page. We received so much new information and photos (and are very thankful for them) that the entire website had to be completely re-designed in latter 2007, with new topics created and existing pages moved from their original locations.
We had to resolve several technical issues before we could release the website to search engines, so we until now we have blocked them from the site. The most serious issues have been resolved, and we are releasing the site to search engines with this update so they can index the site and people can find it.
Our goal is to present as many properly documented stories as possible, and to do so in as brief a time as possible. But as you can see, this takes a lot of time any way you go about it. In addition to working on the Titus County History Website, we are simultaneously doing field work necessary to finish the Titus Cemetery Search website, scanning and adding obituaries to our burial database that we come across while researching history stories, and taking photos and interviewing people around the county to develop new content for this site.
We had two choices when creating this website, and considered keeping it private until everything was complete. We might have waited to complete all stories and then post the entire site with complete and correct stories. We quickly realized that the 162 years of Titus County history from 1846 until 2008 will require several years to fully and properly research, which means it would still be several years before you could begin reading articles and viewing the historic photos that people loaned us to share.
Instead, we decided to go ahead and post the site then correct and expand the articles as we do our research, knowing that some details will be incomplete and for a while and may even later be proven to be incorrect. As research progresses, we will expand the topic and correct any inaccuracies, as this update shows. This way, our visitors can read what we've found and can contribute photos and information to subjects that we're working on. This will result in a much better site in a much shorter time. We've started many articles that are still far too incomplete to add in this update. In addition to the finished and unfinished articles posted now, we have a very long list of articles that we plan to write and add in the future.
The site still contains factual errors and incomplete articles due to lack of time to completely research each article. Please excuse any errors or omissions until we can finish the research necessary. The errors and omissions will be corrected over time as soon available research information permits. Because research to correct currently known errors will take several years to complete, we recommend that information on this site not be used for classroom work until it is completed.
We're also sure some typographical errors were missed. After typing 8-10 hours, you sometimes "can't see the forest for the trees." We tried to proofread all copy, but the volume of material makes it easy to miss small grammatical or typographical errors. Please e-mail us if you notice an error that slipped through. We will appreciate it and will gladly correct the errors!
