Written by Max Rhodes, Lead Metadata Student for the Kempner Collection and a journalism major and history minor.

The Digital Projects Lab has recently completed the process of digitizing and describing over 50,000 letters from the Harris and Eliza Kempner Collection. Starting back in March of 2017 and enlisting the help of approximately 30 student employees, completing the letters of the Kempner Collection has been a massive undertaking.  

The total collection consists of over 66,000 items, including the letters and a myriad of legal documents, newspaper clippings, pamphlets and other text items. Most were originally created between the 1940s and 1960s, but some date back to the late 1800s. The collection was donated by the Kempner Family to the Rosenberg Library in Galveston. In 2016, these items were lent to the UNT Digital Library to be digitized and uploaded to the Portal to Texas History with funding for digitization provided by the Harris and Eliza Kempner Fund.  

The scanning process began the following year after all the letters and other items were shipped to Denton and took a team of students nearly six years to get everything digitized by October of 2022. Since each piece of paper was scanned front and back and some of the letters and other items were several pages long, over 180,000 total scans were made. However, the work was far from complete.  

Next, metadata had to be written for each letter. Metadata makes specific items easier to search for and can allow researchers to find very niche topics. The information in the metadata for each letter would include the date it was written, the name of the person or business who wrote it, the name of the person or business it was addressed to, a summary of the content of the letter, the location where the letter was sent from and addressed to as well as a list of searchable key words or phrases. Despite the sheer number of letters, giving each one its own set of unique information in the metadata makes it possible to keep track of them and find references made to very specific topics. 

Who are the Kempners? 

Harris Kempner was born in a small village in Poland in 1837. He immigrated to New York at the age of 17, and to the newly formed state of Texas in 1856. He joined the Confederate army at the outbreak of the Civil War and served as quartermaster sergeant after being injured in battle. Following the war, he briefly operated a general store in Coldspring before moving to Galveston in 1870. Working with his business partner Mark Marx, Kempner established himself as an important figure in the growing city. He worked to expand the railroads, improve the port to allow for larger ships, and started a powerful banking and cotton empire. 

Kempner married Eliza Seinsheimer of Cincinnati Ohio in March of 1872, and they would have eleven children together, eight of whom survived past childhood. We see correspondence from them all in the collection. Some of the most prominent are Isaac H. Kempner (1873-1967), Daniel W. Kempner (1877-1956) and Isaac’s son, Harris L. Kempner (1903-1987). These three men, along with several other family members ran the company known as H. Kempner for several decades spanning the early and mid-20^th century. Some of the enterprises overseen by the H. Kempner Cotton Company include the Imperial Sugar Company, the United States National Bank, the Texas Prudential Insurance Company and several others. The Kempner family had an enormous impact on the city of Galveston, and on the state as a whole. They kept very detailed accounts of their business practices and saved nearly all business and personal paperwork spanning from the creation of Harris Kempner’s business in the 1880s nearly 100 years to the 1970s.

Sources:

• [Biography of Isaac H. Kempner] – The Portal to Texas History
• [Harris Kempner Biography] – The Portal to Texas History
• [Letter from Vivian Paysse to Joan Meken, January 19, 1966] – The Portal to Texas History
• [Clipping: Daniel W. Kempner Succumbs in Paris] – The Portal to Texas History
• [Clipping: McCallum Named As President of Cotton Shippers] – The Portal to Texas History
• [Copy of Congressional Record Page: Extension of Remarks of Hon. Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, April 25, 1950] – The Portal to Texas History