ABOUT
Topic Selection
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​ I picked this topics because my maternal grandmother, Audrey (Guynn) Harmon worked as a nurse at the Marion Veterans Administration Hospital from 1948-1982, after training at the Cincinnati Jewish Hospital of Nursing under the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps training plan of the U.S. Public Health Service.
Research Process
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My research began with the State Historic Architectural and Archaeological Research Database (SHAARD) as the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, Marion Branch is a state and national registered historic district.
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The newspapers from the Marion, Indiana Chronicle Tribune newspaper are not available in any digital form or on Newspapers.com or similar website. The advancement of technology has coincided with the economic downturn in Marion, Indiana. Due to Indiana's library funding being tied to property taxes, the resources available to the Marion Public Library's Indiana Room have become quite limited.
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I traveled to the MPL Indiana Room and examined their extensive collection of newspaper articles, photographs, and documents in their VA Hospital vertical files. Things weren't well organized, but I was able to scan a significant amount of items for my records. I am hoping to have the opportunity to internship with the MPL Indiana Room and lend a hand to help future researchers.​
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Annotated bibliography
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I selected a collection that included Marion Branch specific resources, and those that include Veterans Administration and Soldiers' Homes as a whole. The concept and the execution of the National Homes for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers is a quite fascinating one, although it is quite obvious that after each war or military conflict, Americans seemed to believe there would not be any more of them, and that we as a country would stop creating more veterans having served in combat.
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Research Challenges
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The biggest challenge was the lack of newspaper digitization and poor quality of microfilm newspaper articles. Many are very difficult to read and deciphering some of the letters can be a challenge. This was the case where the majority of the resources I was working with, especially starting from the inception of NHDVS homes in the 1860s and more specifically the Marion Branch reporting in 1888.
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An ongoing hurdle was the fact that the city of Marion, where my subject is located, has the same name as the county in which the Indiana state capital is located. Marion county is the originator of so much news due to the large population and its standing as the political, economic, and literal center of the state. This made attempts to wade through search results quite frustrating in addition to the fact that Indianapolis also has a VA Hospital.
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I also realized after viewing other presentations that my project was a larger undertaking that I had originally realized, especially in relation to the selections of my classmates. Because the NHDVS has so many buildings, phases of construction, multiple governors and managers, changes in treatment needs, etc. the same amount of information seems to paint an incomplete picture of the Marion NHDVS/VA facility. I will continue researching this topic in my spare time and updating the website. Future additions include yearly governor’s reports, and creating visuals from the data in maps and charts.
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Significance of Project
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I believe that since the technological advances in resource digitization and the ease of creating webpages, this is the first time many of these resources have been available to the public in this form.