What started as a “short-term” position of only one year has stretched into a four-and-a-half-decade career for Francis O’Neill, the senior reference librarian at the Maryland Center for History and Culture (MCHC), where he manages the catalogue of over seven million items at the institution.
Friends and colleagues honored O’Neill yesterday with a celebration recognizing his 45 years at the institution.
MCHC assures researchers and lay people that even after all these years, O’Neill is not going anywhere. The library serves as a resource for genealogists and neighborhood researchers, information O’Neill shepherds with “a passion and erudite knowledge that is unmatched,” according to Katie Caljean, president and CEO of the center.
O’Neill is a native of New Hampshire and attended Catholic University in Washington, D.C. for college. A classmate was working at MCHC in 1980 and told him they were looking for someone on a “short-term” basis, so he came for a year, or so he thought.
“Then they asked me to stay, starting in 1981 then I just did,” O’Neill told Baltimore Fishbowl. “So, I’ve been here ever since.”
The library was initially a subscription library, part of the Maryland Historical Society, which was founded in 1844. O’Neill likened the original library to a club with members who were elected. This was before the advent of public libraries, and only those elected were permitted to borrow books. After World War II, it was open to anyone who wanted to join.
“But the focus was always on the history of Maryland,” O’Neill said. “But that is a wide field. You know, we have books on medicine in Maryland. We have books on the legal system in Maryland, fine arts that are produced by Marylanders.”
He said many MCHC customers are now interested in the manuscript collection, which includes a wealth of original materials related to Maryland’s history. O’Neill, however, says many people are especially drawn to two particular areas: genealogical research and building or architectural research. MCHC has a large collection of genealogical materials that Marylanders find helpful, though as a private institution, it is not permitted to house government records such as birth or marriage certificates. O’Neill can, however, direct people to the appropriate resource or agency that generated the documents they need.
As for buildings and architecture, O’Neill told Baltimore Fishbowl, “People are interested in, you know, ‘What is this building I drive past every day on my way to work? It looks like it was probably built to be a church, but it isn’t a church anymore. What is its history?’” He also said people are curious about vacant lots and often want to know about the buildings that once stood there before the lots became vacant.
The MCHC’s collection, and the library’s by extension, tend to be “Balto-centric,” O’Neill said, wondering if he’d just coined the phrase.
“The people who founded us were mostly residents of Baltimore, and, you know, they gave us material relating to their families and that kind of thing,” O’Neill said. “We have a big collection of Maryland fiction down in the basement here. We used to collect that pretty actively. So, we have a lot of novels and even mathematics books and things like that written by people who identified as Marylanders.”
The library has volumes of correspondence by people from Maryland who are not world-renowned, O’Neill noted. They do, however, have a lot of Francis Scott Key papers, and there is a lot of competition in the auction world for original letters and manuscripts of major historical significance.
“He wrote a lot of other things besides the Star-Spangled Banner,” O’Neill said.
They also have materials dating back to the 17th century from the founding of Maryland, including the Calvert Papers, which belonged to the family of Lord Baltimore. In fact, in 1887, the librarian from the MCHC (then the Maryland Historical Society) went to England and unearthed them from the ground.
“We went over there, over to England in the 19th century, and dug them up out of the garden at the Calvert house, because they thought that they were no longer necessary, and they used them as landfill,” O’Neill said. “So, some of them were kind of the worse for wear. They got a little damp while they had geraniums growing on top of them, but we got them back and, you know, it’s important for somebody to have those.”
A man of quiet expertise and enduring commitment, O’Neill has spent more than four decades helping researchers unlock the stories in Maryland’s past. With his deep knowledge and steady hand, he has become as much of a resource as the archive itself.
