Hi, my name is Caitlin Coon and I'm the Digital Archivist here at Densho.
I manage the historical photograph and document collections you can find in our online Digital
Repository.
If you'd like more about Densho you can go to our website at densho.org.
Today we received a box of historical materials related to Min Tamesa and his father Uhachi
Tamesa.
And to give you a little insight into what we do here, I thought we could film this video
and open the box together.
From my talks with the donor I know that the box contains letters between Uhachi and Min
Tamesa during World War II.
They also have documents related to Min Tamesa's draft resistance during the war, and some
photographs.
We have two packages here, so I'll put this aside for now, and then I'm going to put on
some white gloves since there are photographs.
And the first thing I'm going to pull out is, it looks like a bottle.
And this is interesting because we don't usually get physical objects to scan here at Densho,
but this is a bottle of Tamesa's Tonic.
And I know that Uhachi developed this tonic and he would drive around Seattle and sell
it, and I'm pretty sure it was pre-World War II, so there's that.
And then we've got to rest of these, and let's look at the photographs first.
Put these aside.
So we've got a number of photographs here, and they look like they are mostly between
1950s and 1970s, I would guess.
And it looks like they're mainly of Uhachi and his life in Seattle.
Here's a good portrait of Uhachi, he was ninety-two at the time.
But this here is a photo of Min, and there's writing on the back, and the donor says that
there are very few photos of Min, so that will be nice to have in the Digital Repository.
So here we have the second package that came in the box, and it looks like this envelope
is actually in and of itself a historical document.
It was sent to Uhachi at Heart Mountain concentration camp, and it looks like from Leavenworth,
so it was probably sent while Min was imprisoned there.
And then we'll pull out the contents, and right on top we see letters, and these are
probably the letters the donor was mentioning.
It's from Uhachi to his son Min while he was in Leavenworth, so we actually have quite
a few of those.
And then next we have a letter here and it says, "Dear Frank and friends," so I'm assuming
this is probably to Frank Emi and the Fair Play Committee, and it looks like it was probably
regarding the trial that they had coming up.
And then here we have documents related to Min's draft, so an order to report and selective
service form.
And then we also have some records related to Min's trial and his imprisonment in Leavenworth.
And then probably some more letters and miscellaneous documents that we'll learn more about as we
go through the collection.
So this is really an amazing collection, and I'm excited to get started with the digitization
process.
Welcome to our work room.
This is where most of the processing gets done.
We have a number of ways that we can digitize materials.
One of them is behind me, it's the BookDrive.
We use this to scan bound volumes and oversized materials.
We also have a copystand available for even larger materials.
This is our digitization team, they're hard at work processing collections.
And you can see at their desks that they also have flatbed scanners.
We use these for most of our digitization work.
We've already started scanning the Tamesa materials.
Here you can see that Sara has just finished up one photograph and she's getting ready
to move on to the next one.
We scan at a very high resolution in order to create digital preservation quality files.
This is based off of best practices and standards in the archival profession.
After she's done scanning everything we're gonna process it in Photoshop, catalog it,
and then input it into our Digital Repository software.
After that it will be available as an online collection at ddr.densho.org.
All of these documents are essential to telling Min's story.
We get glimpses from his trial and imprisonment but also get a sense of his relationship with
his father who we know was very supportive of Min, the draft resisters, and the Fair
Play Committee.
These materials are going to be an essential addition to our collections.
Draft resistance and the Fair Play Committee were important episodes in the history of
the incarceration, but we don't have much historical documentation about them here at
Densho.
This will help us fill that gap.