ABSTRACT
So wrote Sam Switzer, a soldier attending the American Expeditionary Force’s Beaune University in France. How did Switzer’s letter, written on 14 April 1919 to his mother in Vicksburg, Mississippi, land in Special Collections at Old Dominion University’s Perry Library in Norfolk, Virginia? The answer seems relatively simple: Switzer’s niece, Bettie Minette Cooper, who settled in Norfolk with her husband in the early 1960s, offered her uncle’s papers to the university on permanent loan in 1980. The materials in the collection migrated to Norfolk from Vicksburg on the death of Sam Switzer. Cooper, a philanthropist and community activist, who has served in a variety of local organizations from the Virginia Symphony and Young Audiences of Virginia to the Chrysler Museum and YMCA of South Hampton Roads as well as in Jewish organizations from Temple Ohef Sholom in Norfolk, Virginia to the Southern Jewish Historical Society, was responsible for managing her uncle’s estate. She first sought out the archivist at the university near her home to conserve Switzer’s World War I era maps, which were too large for her to store and in need of preservation. While Old Dominion University (ODU) did not have a large archive, the heavy presence of the American military in Norfolk, the university’s role in catering to military personnel and
*Email: mhametz@odu.edu
and History, Vol. 15, Nos. 1-2, 124-140, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1462169X.2014.898490
JEWISH MIGRATION AND THE ARCHIVE
their families, and the interest of many of the university’s students in military history made the collection attractive to the archivist. After the maps were donated, Cooper decided to offer Switzer’s correspondence and memorabilia.
