The inception of a research project lies in a question waiting to be answered, a problem waiting to be solved. Often times, the research interests of one person don’t directly align with others’. Fortunate for our research endeavors, Maggie and I had the same idea of what we wanted to study in terms of migration to Kirksville. We are both interested in conducting interviews with the Congolese population in Adair County in order to gain some insight on how community is created in a new environment and how people adapt to their surroundings.
Though we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to study, we still wanted to look into the archival records to find out more about the history of Kirksville and Adair County before committing to our topic. As mentioned in some of the articles we read in class, there was minimal information on African American history (though the Adair County Historical Society has a web page and an archival folder dedicated to the subject), and there wasn’t much on Native American History either.
In the Special Collections Department, we had several staff members assist us in our research, and they found sources that indicated many of the first settlers in Adair County came from Tennessee, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. They were also able to guide us to information on the German-established colony of Ninevah as well as census records detailing the influx of immigrants to Novinger (a mining town west of Kirksville) in the early 1900s.
While the stories of Ninevah and Novinger’s inhabitants through time would no doubt be interesting to follow, Maggie and I have remained firm in our decision to study the Congolese immigrant population in Kirksville, even though the temporal scope is not as large. Maggie has already conducted interviews with some of the members of the community, and I look forward to joining her and adding to the body of established work. I believe that compiling oral histories early on in the migration will be beneficial to anyone wanting to learn more about Adair County’s history along with future Congolese generations curious about their origins in the United States.
Now, to brush up on my French.