My internship for Spring 2025 was at the Cuyahoga County Archives. I had previous experience at the Archives during my Summer 2024 internship with the Italian American Museum of Cleveland, when I completed many hours of property research there. In doing a few hours of research at the County Archives weekly, I found the atmosphere welcoming, the staff friendly, and the process of research and archiving fascinating, and I was very happy when I was offered an internship there for the Spring. My duties consisted of property research, creating displays based upon archival materials and Northeast Ohio history, and keeping the books and other materials neat, tidy, and researcher ready.
Situated in a former factory building in Midtown, a few minutes from Cleveland State, the County Archives contain millions of pieces of archived material. The main purpose of these documents is property and genealogical research, with researchers using the materials found within to trace the histories of historic buildings, their homes, and family members lost to time. Here we can see the property cards for Fenn College, the predecessor of Cleveland State. A property card gives you the parcel number, tax value, dimensions, and the owner of the property. We can also see the location of Fenn in a book of properties, and how huge some of the map books the archives have are. There are older books that are even bigger than that!
Among the stacks of books and boxes, you will come across curious items and familiar names. In the section containing the book of tax records for a given year, which let you know how much taxes were paid by a given person on a given property, we see that in 1895 John D. Rockefeller left $180 of taxes unpaid on his many properties in Cleveland. We can only assume his actual unpaid taxes were far greater.
The Archive is laid out in such a way that there is a front room, containing the elevator, front desk, and offices, a back research room, which contains map books, property cards, and a lovely view of the Cleveland skyline, and a cavernous room behind even that. It is easy to let yourself lost reading old newspaper clippings, and seeking out old boxes no one has touched or even thought about in decades. The ability to not let that happen, and instead focus on the task at hand, is something I have honed in this internship. When you have such a volume of material in front of you, it is easy to feel overwhelmed, but working here at the Archives has made me better at not allowing my attention to stray.
One major project undertaken by interns at the Archives is making a display. In my time here I made one myself, and worked one another with a fellow intern. My solo display was on the history of Cleveland baseball, to celebrate the Guardians opening day, and with another intern we developed an Earth Day display. Researching these topics was fascinating enough, but to pull material from the Archive to go in the cases, and considering the aesthetic and layout of the display to optimize the learning of the observer, made it a very rewarding project. I feel like with these display projects, I have learned a bit about museum studies and exhibits, as well as archiving.
This internship helped confirm that I wish to become an archivist, and it motivated me to apply to Kent State’s Archival Studies program, which I will be attending in the Fall. Even though my internship is ending, I plan to continue on here as a volunteer, doing much of the same work. The Cuyahoga County Archives is a fascinating place to intern or volunteer.
