Gillian Family papers

This collection presents a small portion of small-town Northwest Ohio educational history, as well as a view of the Wood County home-front during the Second World War. The majority of the newspaper clippings and the scrapbook included in the collection deal primarily with the basketball programs in the Portage Village school district. Gillian was an active member of the program and collected a great deal of the information regarding regular season and tournament play that was available through the media at the time. Other printed sources provide more general information about life in Portage during the time period and give context to the social history of Northwest Ohio.

The materials related to Gillian’s education are an invaluable resource for educational researchers. The inclusion of four report cards, spanning from grade five through grade eight, provides the ability to form comparisons between modern education and education during the 1930s. Gillian’s report cards not only trace his progress in several taught subjects, but also contain evaluations of personality and citizenship.

The four newsletters from the Portage Schools contain a wealth of information related to the social history of the area. In the column for alumni news, the surname of the former student is not used, indicating that the community was small enough that only first names were necessary. Advice columns are also particularly interesting, providing a social commentary that seems antiquated in modern times. In addition to a handwritten roster of the eighth grade basketball team that Gillian was a part of, a scrapbook that was included in the donation of the collection is especially important to those interested in the history of Portage basketball program.

The scrapbook, which appears to have been created and maintained by Gillian, contains news clippings and handwritten annotations regarding the basketball program from 1941 – 1943. The first page of the scrapbook is a handwritten roster including coaches, team members and positions, and substitute players. An updated handwritten roster can be found on page eleven. Along with articles cut out of unnamed newspapers and glued into the pages, penciled annotations of game scores and details are found on several pages. Several news clippings contained within the pages all relate to the 1941 – 1943 Wood County high school basketball seasons, with the majority of them being about the Portage team specifically. As Portage is not the only team discussed in all of the news articles, they also stand as a source of information for high school basketball in the county as a whole during the time period.

The scrapbook exists in the collection only as a scanned images and printed copies of the images. The original scrapbook was damaged by mold and mildew and had to be disposed of. It should be noted that Portage Village yearbooks from the Hottingers covering a similar time span as the Gillian papers were accepted into the Wood County Historical Society's collection in May 2012.

Though World War II is not a focus of this collection, it certainly exists in the background, particularly when reading through the school newsletters. While the primary concern of the newsletter editors revolved around the school and the community, the shadow of the war can be seen in many of its pages. An item in the advice column in the December 1942 issue of the "Portage Press" article makes references to young women talking to soldiers; the single piece of correspondence in collection discusses a repayment of "meat stamps" and is written on stationary from the "Office for Emergency Management, War Manpower Commission, United States Employment Service." These are only two of several items in the collection that provide insight into life in Wood County during wartime.

The materials added to the collection in November, 2012 include a notification of Selective Service Exemption for Sidney B. Gillian. He was exempted from conscription due to being the sole provider for his wife and two children. This is particularly notable because of its 1917 date, which places its origin during the First World War.