Roslyn historians take you back in time on new podcast

A trio of historians at the Bryant Library in Roslyn is using a modern method to take listeners on a journey into the past by sharing their insights about the facility's local historical collection on a new podcast.

The creators of the podcast — known as “Gems from the Bryant Room” and available on Spotify — said it's an extension of the work they've been doing to digitize hundreds of records in the archive of cultural heritage materials. 

The collection is filled with 19th- and 20th-century maps and atlases, photographs, postcards, original manuscripts and scrapbooks.

 Reference librarian Wendy Roque said curiosity about an American flag from the 1800s with 42 stars that is framed on the wall of a library records room helped spark the idea for the podcast.

“I was just so fascinated by it, and I wanted to know more, and I thought that people wanted to know about it,” said Roque.

Roque, along with library archivist Carol Clarke and library digital curator Ariel Morabito, are the team behind the new production — which kicked off earlier this month.

Morabito said the mission of the podcast is to share the library’s collection of public history that they’ve gathered over several years. 

“They can’t enjoy it unless we make it accessible,” Morabito said of local residents. 

Clarke said the need to have a digital presence became more apparent during the pandemic.

“Most people have an idea of history as the facts and dates that they learned in school, but it’s so much more,” Clarke added. “People are living history every day or making it, and future generations want to know about it.”

The podcast isn't polished, but it's a fresh take on Roslyn's past from a trio passionate about developing stories of local history.

One of the first two episodes is about the 42-star flag. Bryan Pearsall, whose family is one of several Black families featured in the library’s historical collection, donated the flag to the library in 2021.

The flag originally belonged to his grandparents, Eugene and Marcellena Pearsall, who raised eight children in the Roslyn area in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, according to library officials.

“This was hanging in their home,” Clarke said. “They lived in Roslyn Heights and there is a street named after the family — Pearsall Place.”

The other podcast episode takes listeners into the Bryant Room, where the library's historical collection is stored, as Clarke and Morabito discuss family photographs, drawings and even two baby spoons connected to the Ramsauer family, a prominent white family in Roslyn in the early 1900s.

Clarke said the library's Ramsauer collection is a result of more than 10 years of donations from family members.

“We pulled all the boxes out, opened them up and started just talking about what was in them, how we were going to proceed with the arrangement process,” she said about the Ramsauer podcast episode. 

As the researchers move forward with the podcast, they also are gathering more documents from the 1950s to the 1970s, a time not as prevalent in the library's collection.

“As an archivist, I feel I’m kind of looking ahead to what people 25 years or 50 [years] from now are going to want to know about what was going on now or 25 years in the past,” Clarke said.

The podcast hosts said they plan on publishing episodes quarterly but described their approach as more “organic,” where they'll publish “whatever gems we mine.”