Ugly Susan

My mother, during a stint as a school counselor, sometimes used a photo that my family affectionately calls Ugly Susan. Teenagers would come to her bemoaning the weight of navigating adolescence in the digital age, and she would pull out the photo as proof that the current cocoon is not permanent. The kids would recoil — physically pull back, as if distance alone might offer protection from the uncertainty and earnestness peering back at them from 1998.

Ugly Susan isn’t a monster. She’s just been… misdirected. She trusted someone in a rural Ohio strip mall to give her a Princess Diana haircut. Her cardigan gaps at the buttons. She’s never smoked, shoplifted, or been sent to the principal’s office. Her first job will be giving tours to other children at the local historical society museum. There’s no way around it: Ugly Susan is a nerd.

Nearly thirty years after that photo was snapped, I finally found Ugly Susan the perfect job: I founded the Office of Special Collections. I evaluate archives that range from national institutions to families emptying out their houses. Rifling through dusty church records in some crumbling basement? Yes please. Carefully going through old microfilm slides at the public library? Absolutely. Following up with government officials about document requests? That is where Ugly Susan lives.

And what I keep finding, buried in the analog record, are people.

Not birth certificates. Not census rolls. Not yearbook images. People.

People who had a hobby. A key on a hook by the door. A joke they could be relied upon to tell at holiday parties. People who have been compressed by history into a statistic, an endnote, or an Ancestry.com profile.

I may have invested in a proper haircut, but Ugly Susan never left. She just leveled up her Boolean search terms. If you have a story that needs to be told, let’s talk.