How Did Students From the 1910s Get on Facebook? - Mashable

There is a glitch in the matrix at the University of Nevada at Reno, where two students from the 1910s have joined Facebook.

Joe McDonald‘s profile says that he likes to box, that his favorite musicians include W.C. Handy, Irving Berlin and Scott Joplin. He’s listed as “In a relationship” with Leola Lewis, who, according to her profile, enjoys embroidery and the literary works of Jane Austen and Edgar Allen Poe. Neither mention Angry Birds or Kanye West.

The two profiles are actually the creation of Donnelyn Curtis, director of the university’s research collections, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education. McDonald and Lewis graduated in 1915 and 1913, respectively, and later married, according to the report. Curtis created their profiles after gaining approval from the granddaughter of McDonald, who died in 1971.

Curtis told the Chronicle that the unique project is meant “to help history come alive a little bit for students” and expose the university’s special collections to a wider audience. Curtis writes all of the couple’s status updates, which incude messages that express worry about “a possible smallpox epidemic,” eagerly anticipate “sleighrides,” and recount McDonald’s job at a mining company.

“It’s been hard to walk the line between being historically accurate and making it interesting for college students,” Curtis told the Chronicle.

McDonald’s photos include pictures of “Rugby Football” matches from 1912 and school field trips. Lewis’s profile sports photos from on-campus events and one shot the university’s representative at women’s suffrage conference. “Thanks to her hard work, Nevada women should be able to vote in 1914!” reads the caption.

Curtis said that at first only extended family members of the couple sent friend requests, but each now have well over 100 connections. She also told the Chronicle that, in hopes of expanding interest in the project, she is considering creating a Facebook profile for another student who was a friend of the couple but left school to work in a mine. She also might invite more recent alumni of the university to create profiles depicting themselves in college during the 1950s and 1960s.

For now, though, McDonald and Lewis appear to be adjusting well to their reincarnated lives online.

In his most recent status update, McDonald wrote of heading back to campus from a nearby mining town and said he is “feeling lucky to have so many Friends, from all times and places, old and new.”

No word yet on whether or not McDonald and Lewis are considering a switch to Facebook Timeline.

What do you think of this project? Would you like to see more ideas like this catch on? Let us know in the comments.