The Information Age (Unit 9)

My final project is my continued research on the Mount Vernon Electric Railway (or Trolley) that I started in another class last semester. I am thinking about expanding the paper eventually to include how people traveled to Mount Vernon from George Washington's time to the opening of the George Washington Memorial Highway. In my research, I have come across a lot of material that covers the time before the trolley and after.

In addition, to the paper version of my project, I need to build a timeline to help me get my thoughts in order, and building a time-line website would help me with this. I am thinking of using a WordPress site to do this since I have used it before for other projects. I rather use my own domain and website, but this is not in my current budget. I also need to locate additional pictures beyond what I have already. Some of them have come from Merriken's "Old Dominion trolley too: A history of the Mount Vernon Line," but there has to be other pictures available.

I have used the The Historical Washington Post from 1877 through 2000 through Proquest via the Fairfax County Public Library to gather quite a bit of information on the trolley, but the photos that rarely appear are less than adequate quality. I am planning to go to the Alexandria city's Local History/Special Collections public library on Queen Street to search for additional photos along with visiting the library at Mount Vernon.

Also, I am going to look at my search terms to see if I am finding the information I need. I noticed that the Historic Washington Post gave me different and sometimes better results if I tweeked the words. Mount Vernon returned fewer results than Mt. Vernon. I expect this has to be the way the database was designed. Using abbreviations may be key to finding better information in the older records.