On Saturday, community members throughout Perry County and beyond brought their old documents, photographs, artifacts, and scans to be digitized.
Director Trish Erzfeld says it’s a part of a partnership between her organization Perry County Heritage Tourism, the Perry County Historical Society, and the Missouri Humanities Council that has created a new database with multiple objectives.
“[The goal was] to just allow the public to share their stories with other people and then obviously to preserve the cultural heritage for later generations,” Erzfeld says. “So that we have those stories to pass on and to tell."
She says it was aimed at helping to improve the public understanding of the impact German settlers had on the region.
Much of the area, she says, has been impacted by the Saxon and Bavarian Lutherans and the Baden Catholics.
Participants brought great artifacts, she says, ranging from German family Bibles to naturalization documents to certificates from weddings, confirmations, and baptisms.
Many of these were fragile items, she says, and this has given them the opportunity to extend the lives of those items a bit longer, along with the stories they have to tell.
Erzfeld said they were interested in holding another event like this one in the future.