Museum Digitizing Interviews

Alexander Hamilton Mike, Jr. was born in the Creek community surrounding the Union Agency now atop Agency Hill west of Muskogee. His birth occurred, he said, in 1874.

When Dub West interviewed Mr. Mike in September 1973, his voice showed the weakness of advanced age. Despite his low volume, A. H. could recall events and people from the earliest days of Muskogee's history.

Since 1860, man has been interested in recording the human voice. Mr. A. H. Mike was among the first persons Dub West recorded for posterity. Dub recorded nearly two hours of Mr. Mike's recollections.

Mike's interview is among the more than 180 discussions Dub recorded. He began in 1970 and continued recording on audiotape for nearly two full decades. His interviewees were all born before 1924. Mr. Mike, for example, was nearly 100 years old when Dub interviewed him.

Dub West sought out many long-time residents to interview. While most lived in the Muskogee area, he did not limit himself to the immediate area. He also sought out knowledgeable people in McIntosh and Cherokee Counties. Though West conducted interviews year round, he visited informants more between late winter and summer.

Following Dub West's death in 2001, the family donated the collection of interviews to the newly established Three Rivers Museum. The museum duplicated many of the tapes for preservation purposes years ago.

Developments in technological areas, however, mean today's audiocassette tapes are a dying recording media. Realizing this, the staff and volunteers have begun the process of digitizing these audiocassettes for the long-term future.

The process necessitate that each tape be played on a tape player that is connected to a computer. The computer used a recording program to re-record the stories digitally.

After this comes more steps before the interviews will be of much use to historians. Transcriptions of an interview are necessary, too. Such transcriptions point to accounts of an individual, place or event that historians will want to study.

The Three Rivers Museum has an offer for you. If you have a taped recording of an area resident, you may bring the cassette tape to the Three Rivers Museum. Then the museum will create a digital file for you to take home on the flash drive. There will be no charge for this service.

All the museum asks is that you allow it to retain a copy of the recording in order to expand the museum's collection. You get the added benefit of seeing that your relative's voice lives on in an institution dedicated to preservation of area history.