Abstract
Despite being largely concentrated in a few urban industrial cities of the Northeast, where they have been the major ethnic group for over a century, until recently Portuguese-Americans have remained largely invisible and powerless in their communities of settlement. Theirs was a history that was undocumented and often brushed aside as being insignificant by the community itself. This paper explores how family/personal archives found at the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American archives at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, can be used to not only study the settlement of Portuguese-Americans, but also allow for the study of the local community. These records have allowed the Archives to establish itself as the only known American institution that actively documents and preserves Portuguese-American heritage, and that uses a community development philosophy to engage with the Portuguese-American community.