Maryland’s history is both complex and diverse, with many stories still being uncovered to this day.
William Kelly, a research archivist from the Maryland State Archives, argues that Maryland residents could benefit from spending more time digging into it.
“Maryland is an extremely complicated state, and it’s not neat, and no state’s history is,” Kelly told Capital News Service. “Understanding Maryland’s complexity would help Marylanders, and does help Marylanders sort of better understand their own identity as a state.”
Kelly conducts research and assists with events at the Maryland State Archives, located in Annapolis.
The archives holds a plethora of records and data from the earliest years of the state’s history to today. But the archives does more than just store old records. The agency can help people find answers about recent history that may apply to their property or personal lives.
“People come to us with real-life, immediate situations that they need resolved,” Kelly said, “whether that be in a court case or a name change or dual citizenship or expungement of a record or things like that.”
However, there are other important purposes of the state’s archives, one of which is assisting in uncovering understudied events or resolving misunderstood historical situations.
“I think there’s an assumption among many that history has only one version and that it can be complete,” Kelly said. “But … when different people are researching different things from different perspectives, we’re just pursuing a fuller picture of what we know about the past.”
Kelly eventually came to realize something about the historical research that changed the way he approached his work.
“No historian ever comes to the past totally objective,” he said. “That’s something that used to be the sort of the ideal, but we eventually came to the realization that everybody comes to history in a subjective way. They’re carrying their own personal baggage, or their own political beliefs or the way they look at the world.”
Studying the state’s history could help Marylanders better understand their background and identity and feel more connected to their neighbors.
“The other aspect is that it helps people understand their own identities, helps communities understand their own identities and get rooted in their own community even more,” Kelly said. “We have tools at our disposal that we can lend to or help support communities trying to better understand their past.”