Our Home: An Eastie Community Archiving Project, began in 2019 as a collaboration between East Boston residents, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, artist Anthony Romero, Northeastern’s NULawLab, and several area nonprofits. Its central aim was to activate East Boston’s activist past by hosting history-capturing and storytelling events for residents and making the resulting materials available for research as part of Northeastern University’s University Archives and Special Collections.In 2020, the Boston Research Center (BRC), began visioning an expansion of Our Home, enriching the web portal with refreshed content and adding hundreds of digitized photographs, newspapers, oral histories, and other primary source materials. That same year, the East Boston Social Centers approached the BRC about providing support for a memoir project for older adults in the Social Centers’ community. Between 2020 and 2022, the BPL worked with GrubStreet, Boston’s creative writing center, to develop multi-week memoir courses. Through generous funding by the Boston Public Library, GrubStreet, a Boston-based creative writing center, provided 16 weeks of memory-making and memory-capturing lessons to participants via Zoom in the spring and summer of 2021. GrubStreet and the BPL treated this as a pilot program and went on to offer additional memoir courses in the summer and fall of 2022 in partnership with the Roxbury, South End, and East Boston Branches; these courses were funded by the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. At the conclusion of these writing courses, some memoirists are opting to add their memoirs to an anthology of Boston stories, to be published by GrubStreet in the winter of 2022. Others are electing to add their stories to this web portal.In 2022, the BRC partnered with the East Boston Historical Society & Museum and Zumix to hold website feedback sessions with both adult and youth audiences. With this input from the East Boston Historical Society and Museum and Zumix, BRC staff will continue to add resources to this web portal, ensuring that it is a user-friendly resource for neighborhood residents, area researchers, and K-12 audiences.
About the Boston Research Center
The Boston Research Center (BRC), based in the Northeastern University Library, is a digital community history and archives lab. The BRC’s mission is to help bring Boston’s deep neighborhood and community histories to light through the creation and use of new technologies. Through these technologies, Boston residents can share the underrepresented stories from their community’s past, as well as a deeper understanding of how this past shapes our present. The BRC is hosted at Northeastern but is designed to be a collaborative effort among many organizations in Boston—civic, research, teaching, and cultural heritage—devoted to developing institutional partnerships and fostering community engagement.The historical materials used here are developed in partnership with various organizations in Boston, including the Boston Public Library and Massachusetts Historical Society.