Tacoma Historical Society Collects Digital Journal Entries During the Time of COVID-19

By Riley Dolan

How will future historians be able to understand what life was like for the average person during the coronavirus pandemic? The Tacoma Historical Society is seeking to answer that question by gathering journal entries, through Google Form submissions, from their city’s residents. 

“Most exciting I think for me is that, because I am someone that does local history research, the idea that in 20 or 30 years, someone wanting to write about this event in 2020 could come to our museum archives and find this information,” Kim Davenport, the historical society’s communication manager, said in an interview. “I’ve often hit roadblocks of not being able to find the type of first hand of accounts that I’d like to find about an event, so we’re really trying to contribute to the historic record that way.” 

With COVID-19 causing devastating impacts across the world, it may be important in any future pandemics for historians to be able to look back to today to see how cities responded. And Tacoma’s response to the Spanish Flu offers valuable insights for how to respond to this pandemic: “it sounded like a very similar social-political conflict to the one we’re having now, where there was disagreement between different municipalities about when to reopen things, and the story in this area is that Tacoma stayed closed a little bit longer than Seattle did, and Seattle got hit harder by a second wave of illness because of that,” Davenport said, “I certainly see a lesson there.” 

But beyond looking at a city-wide response, it is important to the Tacoma Historical Society that they record the history of everyday people during this time, a perspective that is lacking from our nation’s last pandemic of this size, “When you read newspaper accounts [of the Spanish Flu] you can get a sense of the situation but you’re not truly hearing a diversity of voices, you’re just hearing that one reporter’s commentary on what happened,” Davenport said. 

“It’s important to realize that maybe 100 years ago the Tacoma newspaper didn’t necessarily represent everyone in the city. Maybe the voices of women or people of color weren’t actively sought out, weren’t represented in that media.” Davenport continued. 

In order to get these diverse responses, the Tacoma Historical Society has been increasing their outreach, “We’ve reached out in a lot of different ways, we have our various social media channels, we have our website of course […] And thankfully our mayor thought it was a great project so she has announced it in a couple of public meetings that she has held over the internet, so we feel pretty confident that we have gotten it out to a fairly wide range of people in the community,” Davenport said. 

In addition to the historical society’s increased outreach efforts, Davenport also suspects the high engagement with this project is also because people stuck at home are eager to find something to do: “We’ve been doing more outreach than we normally would but I also think people are more looking for things to do online while they’re staying home.”