Processing Senator Byrd’s Photograph Collection

By Jody Brumage
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In the past few weeks, the Byrd Center archives staff has been at work processing the extensive photograph collection of Senator Robert Byrd. Spanning his entire life and career, the collection includes official images from the U.S. Senate, delegation trips, campaign events, project dedications, and family photographs. Numbering in the thousands of photographs, the collection will be a long-term process to rehouse, describe, and digitize.

Sorting unlabeled photographs into boxes for each decade of Senator Byrd’s career.

Unlike other parts of Senator Byrd’s collection which came to the archives in an arranged order, the photographs were scattered throughout other parts of the papers, requiring reorganization. The photographs are being placed in chronological order, but this requires some research to pin down specific dates or even decades, given the wide range of dates represented in the collection.
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At the present, we are working on arranging the images we don’t have specific dates for into decades. Later in the project, we will sit down with Senator Byrd’s extensive press collection, which includes over 150 clippings scrapbooks, to find more specific information for these unknown images.

Online databases, Senator Byrd’s autobiography, and reference books on the Congress and Senate are some of the sources being used to discover information about Senator Byrd’s photographs.

We will keep you up to date with our progress as we make our way through the collection. In the meantime, we would like to share some of the unique images we have found so far. Click on any of the thumbnails below to view the image enlarged.