Messenger - Vol. 4, No. 1, Page 29 1994 Alumni Profile Digging up documents Investigating a family history can uncover all sorts of intriguing details. Joseph Neville, Delaware '62, a senior program officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities, knows firsthand about such excitement. Uncovering a German influence in his own family, Neville set off down a path of scholarship, focusing on German immigration that occurred between 1850 and 1914 in his hometown of Wilmington, Del. His scholarly work on the subject landed him in an innovative, professional development program begun by NEH last year. Neville is one of six staff members selected to take part in an independent study, research and development program. The program allows staffers-many of whom have backgrounds as scholars, teachers or curators-to keep abreast of current developments in their respective fields and to cultivate capabilities as program administrators. Created by Congress in 1965, the NEH is an independent agency that supports education, research, preservation projects and public programs in the humanities. For the past two years, Neville, who lives in Dale City, Va., has worked on his research project in his spare time. He says he expects the NEH program will enable him to make significant progress on the project as well as sharpen his skills as an historian. Neville is particularly interested in the marriages involving Wilmington's first- and second-generation German immigrants. He is using church documents, local and federal civil records and newspapers to determine how the immigrants and their children were "Americanized." "It's my hypothesis that Wilmington's Germans melted into the surrounding population rather quickly, and that crucial evidence for their having done so can be found in the frequency with which German immigrants and their immediate children married outside their group," Neville says. Neville will examine the Germans' intermarriage patterns, the ethnicity of their non-German spouses and the role of religion in the assimilation process. According to Neville, Germans were the second largest ethnic group to immigrate to 19th-century Wilmington. They were preceded by the Irish. The Germans ventured into a city that experienced considerable industrialization and urbanization. At the NEH, Neville directs the fellowship program for college teachers and independent scholars, chairing more than 100 panels, most of which were in American and European history. He holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and an M.A. from Pennsylvania State University. -Zandra Singleton