Where the Record Begins

It began with a question that never quite settled.

How did he get there?

At six, 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. He promised her he would.

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—organized chronologically by the year each student first attended. Within each year, the names appear randomly, with no alphabetization. Students’ hometowns and counties are also listed, but again, without a pattern. Counties or towns for example, are not grouped together. Other than the start years being listed chronologically, nothing else in the list is organized.

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 the 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. I learned the hard way that data copied from a website would not sort or function correctly once entered into Excel. The only way forward was to enter each name, year, town, and county by hand.

One—line—at—a —time.

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

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

The record itself contained an error.

This is where the work begins to change.

Not just reading what was recorded,
but questioning it.
Correcting it.
Laying it beside what was remembered.

Until piece by piece,
the record and the memory begin to meet—
and the first outlines of the journey begin to emerge.

— Gathering the fragments, one memory at a time…