As an archivist, Emma Prince often finds herself in dusty museum storage rooms and sometimes-moldy home attics.
She and her nearly all-women team of genealogists and historians build archives for museums, schools and other organizations through her St. Louis-based company, Backlog.
In her work organizing catalogs and tracking down lost ancestors, Prince also challenges popular notions about who does this kind of research.
“I think that people imagine old men in tweed jackets,” Prince said. “That's definitely not our staff. [It’s] kind of fun to show up to meetings and be a little bit more modern and kind of move the profession forward.”
Since she founded Backlog in 2021, Prince’s clients have included the City Museum, Walt Disney Hometown Museum and St. Louis University High. Backlog’s historians also connect with people virtually by hosting webinars about archiving digital work or decoding old documents. Prince said the company’s specialized services often come into play when individuals get stuck.
“We do a lot of ‘brick wall’ research, like, ‘Hi, my family’s from St. Louis, [and] we can't connect to this different generation. Can you help us?’ So archives [work] is more the organization of stuff, and the genealogy [work] is doing research sometimes with that stuff.”
To hear more about the retrospective and forward-looking nature of Emma Prince’s archival work and how detective skills are part of her process, listen to full St. Louis on the Air conversation on Apple Podcast, Spotify and YouTube, or click the play button below.
“St. Louis on the Air” brings you the stories of St. Louis and the people who live, work and create in our region. The show is produced by Ulaa Kuziez, Miya Norfleet, Emily Woodbury, Danny Wicentowski, Elaine Cha and Alex Heuer. The audio engineer is Aaron Doerr.
