Where the Record Begins

It began with a question that never quite settled.

How did he get there?

At six years old, my father left home in West Tennessee and traveled across the state to the Tennessee School for the Deaf. The story was always there in pieces—names of towns he could still recall—but the journey itself remained just out of reach. Who else was there, and what did that journey look like for the children who traveled with him?

This is an attempt to follow that path back.

This list is a reconstruction, shaped by what could be found—and what could not.

The first record I was able to work from was the 100th Anniversary Yearbook of the Tennessee School for the Deaf.

It is not a small book, and it was not easily come by. My father did not receive a copy as part of his time at the school. He asked the school principal, Mrs. Poore, for one, and was told he could have it if he paid five dollars for it when he returned after the summer.

That summer, he worked on his mother’s farm, and helped his grandmother and uncle. When he returned, he paid for the book himself.

The yearbook contains a list of students who attended the school from 1845 to 1945. The names are not arranged alphabetically. They are listed by the year each student first attended, and within each year, the names appear simply as they were recorded.

There are roughly 2,700 names in that list.

There is no surviving passenger record of the children who traveled to the Tennessee School for the Deaf in September of 1932. What remains are names—drawn from this yearbook—placed in relation to time and geography to begin understanding who may have been part of that journey.

To begin working with the list, it had to be transcribed.

An earlier attempt—copying names from an online source—proved unreliable. The data would not sort or function correctly. The only way forward was to enter each name, year, town, and county by hand.

One line at a time.

The list itself offered no easy structure. It was not alphabetized, and within each year, the names appear without clear ordering.

That process made something visible that had not been clear before.

Within the printed list, a section of entries had been set incorrectly. Columns from two different years had been reversed. It is not immediately obvious when reading the page, but it becomes clear when each line is examined and placed in order.

The record itself contained an error.

The full list has been transcribed for research purposes, but is not reproduced here in full.

This is where the work begins to change. Not just reading what was recorded, but testing it, correcting it, and placing it alongside what was remembered—bringing the record and memory together to begin reconstructing what can no longer be directly known.

— Gathering the fragments, one memory at a time…