Historical Commission to add video interviews to archival efforts

MADISON HEIGHTS — Last year, the Madison Heights Historical Commission put out a call for anyone with “artifacts of the city” — items such as photos, videotapes and newspaper articles that show people, places and events from the city’s past. The goal is to create an online collection that will be open to the public.

That effort continues this year, along with plans to conduct video interviews with people who witnessed those events firsthand. The interviews could feature long-time residents, as well as current and former city staff, school employees and business owners.

The Historical Commission is interested in firsthand accounts of things such as past festivals and parades, school clubs and competitions, different areas of the city before they were developed, and how people felt at the time.

Many physical relics are already cataloged in the Heritage Rooms, a museum in the lower level of Madison Heights City Hall, located at 300 W. 13 Mile Road. The rooms are currently closed for renovations, but will reopen to the public at a later date.

Mark Bliss, the mayor pro tem of Madison Heights, serves on the Historical Commission’s digitization subcommittee, along with City Councilman Sean Fleming. He said the goal is to create an online database that people can search freely.

For example, someone could type in “Lamphere Band 1985,” and pull up yearbook photos, recordings of a state competition, or maybe interviews with people who played in the band that year. Everything in the database will be assigned tags to improve search results.

Items can be shared by emailing Bliss at markbliss@madison-heights.org. Once the digital copies are made, the original items will be returned to their owners. Media that has already been digitized can be attached to the email. The same email address can also be used by anyone wishing to volunteer for a video interview.

Bliss said the interviews will be especially valuable to future generations.

“It’s very important to get the story behind the story. This is critically important to me,” he said. “As we digitize things like photographs and video cassettes, we will get an idea of what was happening at the time. But the only way to get what people were feeling at that time is to actually do the interviews. So both Sean and myself, along with other members of the commission, are going to go out, and whether it’s a sit-down interview in person or done virtually through Zoom, we want to hear from the people who lived through those moments.

“What was it like when City Hall was first built? How about our Fire Department? Or how about when our Meijer was built? All big issues of the day, and understanding the feelings and reactions of the people involved, the discussions they had, and what it was like to live and work here back then, those are the perspectives you lose to time. And once you lose them, you’re stuck inferring what people actually felt, instead of truly understanding,” Bliss said.

Fleming agreed. He also noted that filming the interviews will likely begin this summer.

“The city is going to be 70 years old soon, so people who remember the beginning would be even older. And so we really need to do this in a timely fashion,” Fleming said. “We know there are individuals within the city who could provide an oral history. We’re looking for stories from people who remember how life used to be in Madison Heights.”

The mayor, Roslyn Grafstein, said the Historical Commission is doing important work preserving the city’s heritage.

“Once our historical records have been digitized, they will be more easily accessible, and it will be as simple as checking a database instead of hunting through boxes of old documents,” she said in an email. “Over time, photos fade, pages yellow with age, and older handwritten documents can become illegible. Preserving documents in a digital format will help keep these historical records safe for future generations.”