Eleven UF students are finalizing travel plans to eastern Virginia, where the group will research past and present oral traditions in the field this October.
The students will travel with UF graduate coordinator Jessica Taylor for the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program. The five-day trip begins Oct. 21 with UF senior research staff member for the program, Diana Dombrowski, assisting.
A handful of the students conceptualized the research project, formally known as A Festival of Oral History and Folklore.
"We were sitting in class, talking about how cool it would be to interview people about their ghost stories near Halloween," said Taylor, who organized the trip.
Austyn Szempruch, a UF history junior from Naples, Florida, said the group thought "about what we’d like to do for future projects and places we might like to go and research."
Eastern Virginia, he said, was agreed upon as a "terrific idea."
With recent economic decline and erosion of the Chesapeake Bay marine environment, the fishing industry in eastern Virginia is facing great adversity.
"Eastern Virginia is really special because it’s on the cusp of future development, and it’s important to help people preserve the trades that are associated with marine art," Taylor said. "They want us to come up there, so that’s really great, too. It’s not so much a UF initiative as much as it is an initiative on the part of Virginians who want to help."
This research project will cost $7,400 and is funded in part by UF sources.
"This project is important because it’s crucial that it be done now," Taylor said. "With the death of the commercial fishing industry, that means that fewer people are going into it."
She said the youngest crabber the group has interviewed so far is 45 years old, and the man said he was not planning on passing down his skills to any of his children.
"For a lot of these guys, they want to be able to share their craft," she said.
[A version of this story ran on page 5 on 9/26/2014]
This article has been corrected to reflect Dombrowski and Taylor's situations are reversed. It previously said Dombrowski was the main researcher, but it is Taylor who is taking the students to Virginia.
