Museum Director John Long shows the Georgianna Saunders Midwife records to board members Connie Stone and Willie Robertson. / Photo courtesy of John Long, the Salem Museum.

John Long of the Salem Museum shares the following information:

Thanks to all those who voted in the Virginia’s Top 10 Endangered Artifacts polling! Because of your impressive mouse clicking, we finished with almost 11,000 votes, putting us in third place statewide in the tally! Our supporters outvoted a lot of much bigger museums from much bigger cities– testimony to how much Salemites value their history!

Now, because the public voting is only one component in determining the Top 10, we won’t know for another few weeks whether our Georgianna Saunders Midwife Records made the list or not. We’re pretty confident, but the program has been a definite boon for us no matter the outcome! Not only did we get a lot of good PR out of it, but we were able to speak with no less than six people who had been delivered by Mrs. Saunders and who shared their stories with us. As a result, we are continuing to collect oral history on Georgianna and to consider the best ways to have the valuable data in her records put into a format that can be used by researchers.

If you knew or knew of Georgianna Saunders, we’d love to hear what you remember! We’d also LOVE to have a photo of her for our collection! Any help is greatly appreciated, and thanks again for what our supporters did to raise awareness of Endangered Artifacts throughout Virginia!

If you have information–or a photo!–to share, you can contact the Salem Museum by calling 540-389-6760 or emailing info@salemmuseum.org.