Center For Sacramento History Documenting Life During Coronavirus Pandemic
SACRAMENTO (CBS13) - COVID-19 has changed the course of history and that's why a local museum wants to document the impact the virus had had on life in Sacramento.
"We are in what we call the vault, which is our storage area for artifacts and archival materials," said Veronica Kandl who works at the Center for Sacramento History. "We are the institution that collects city history so we want to be able to keep this for future generations," she added.
A look at their collection tells the tale of Sacramento from its inception in 1849.
"We have mortgage records, court records, deeds," she said.
There is also a volume of books, and now the museum is now adding a new chapter: one about the coronavirus pandemic.
"So people's experience of the Covid pandemic," she said.
The center is asking the public to submit personal stories, digital photos, videos, and audio recordings.
"If someone wrote a song about Covid and they recorded it, well a recording of something like that or a photograph of chalk art, or, like, someone in my neighborhood went around and painted rocks.," she said.
Later on, three-dimensional artifacts will be collected and stored with other treasures, like a bed that President Ulysses S. Grant slept in. They are expecting items like signs from a local business that say, "we only have three rolls of toilet paper left," or stimulus checks.
The museum wants to document how the coronavirus changed the social, economic, and cultural landscape.
"It will be interesting to look back in five years and see what has happened," said Kandl.
The museum will do something similar with the Black Lives Matter movement.