A new partnership between Getty Images and the genealogy website Ancestry aims to save the records and photographs of historically Black colleges and universities.
Lincoln University in Pennsylvania is digitizing its photos and documents with the help of Getty Images and Ancestry.
Cassandra Illidge
A group of Claflin University students were perusing old campus photos when one image caught a student’s eye—it was a picture of his grandmother from her college days. He knew they attended the same historically Black university in South Carolina, but he had never seen a picture of her in her younger years.
For Cassandra Illidge, vice president of global partnerships and executive director of the HBCU Grants Program at Getty Images, such moments both drive and affirm the company’s expanding work with HBCUs to preserve photos, documents and records in partnership with the genealogy website Ancestry.
Identifying his grandmother gave that student “a deeper connection with that institution, with the history and that legacy,” Illidge said, “and that’s what we’re hoping everyone will enjoy with this relationship and this partnership.”
Funded by Getty Images’ HBCU Grants Program, which started in 2021 with four institutions, the new partnership aims to digitize HBCU archival materials ranging from photos to student newspapers to course catalogs. Getty and Ancestry are working with 10 HBCUs—and counting—to create searchable digital archives for each institution, accessible to students and staff on Ancestry’s website. HBCUs maintain full copyright ownership of all their materials, and any money made from licensing the photos goes back into the digitization project. Meanwhile, students on each campus, who can receive stipends provided by the restaurant chain Denny’s, help to identify documents and photos to preserve and digitize them using scanners donated by Epson.
The companies are also preserving current documents and records for students and alumni of the future.
“You’ll see campus queens from the1950s and campus queens from 2025,” Illidge said, referencing a time-honored HBCU tradition of crowning royal courts.