I didn't Know I Was Building An Archive

For years, I thought I had a lot of old family photographs. I knew we had more than most families, but I never thought of them as a collection, much less an archive. They were simply our family pictures, passed down from one generation to the next.

That changed when I started researching the people in them. I wanted to know who they were, when and where the photos were taken, and how everyone fit into our family. As I found answers, the photographs began to tell a much larger story. I could follow people through different stages of their lives and see the family change from one generation to the next.

I also began to realize just how much had survived. There were thousands of photographs, but there were also letters, documents, yearbooks and family artifacts. My great-grandparents, Paul and Alice Watson, raised their family in Dallas beginning in the late 1800s. We have photographs of their children when they were young and others taken decades later. My grandmother, Ethel Watson Clark, was born in Dallas in 1905, and we still have her 1924 Booker T. Washington High School yearbook. When the family moved to Los Angeles around 1938, the photographs continued.

What makes these photographs especially important to me is how ordinary many of them are. They show Black people going to school, traveling, buying cars, spending time with friends, getting married, raising children and enjoying their lives. Of course, they were living through segregation and other realities of their time, but that was not the entirety of their lives.

That matters because Black history is often presented through major events and famous people. Those stories are important, but our everyday lives are part of Black history too. A photograph of a Black family standing beside a new car in the 1930s may not document a historic event, but it documents something about who they were, how they lived and what they accomplished.

Eventually, I realized that what my family had preserved was much more than a group of old photographs. Together, these photographs, documents, artifacts and stories form a record of one Black family across more than a century. That is The Watson-Clark Family Collection.

I didn't set out to create it. In fact, the generations before me had already done that. They saved these things and passed them down. My role has been to identify the people, research their lives, preserve the stories and make sure that what they left behind isn't lost.

It makes me wonder how many other families have an archive without realizing it. Maybe it isn't thousands of photographs. It could be one box, a few albums, some letters and a Bible filled with names and dates. The size isn't really the point. What matters is knowing what you have and preserving the information that gives it meaning.

I thought I was researching my family history. Somewhere along the way, I realized I had also become its keeper.