Denver Public Library: Western History Genealogy: News, Exhibits and Classes

Western History/Genealogy Newsletter

August 2008

Welcome to The Denver Public Library's Western History/Genealogy News. This page is updated monthly and includes:

Exhibit
Archives Collection News
Mystery Photograph
New Books in the Western History Collection
New Books in the Genealogy Collection

Exhibits

1908-When the Democrats First Came to Denver

August 6 - October 31, 2008
The Central Library, Vida Ellison Gallery - Level 7
This special 1908 Democratic National Convention joint exhibit is presented by the Denver Public Library and the Colorado Historical Society. The exhibit is curated by Myron H. Vallier, of the Denver Public Library Western History/Genealogy Department and Judy Steiner, Associate Curator, Photography and Films, at the Colorado Historical Society. Nearly 100 scanned photographs, newspapers, maps, etc. and memorabilia from the Denver Public Library Western History Manuscript Collection, the Colorado Historical Society, and the Auraria Casa Mayan Heritage will be on display.

Archives Collection

A note about the Archives Collection: all Archives Collections are cataloged and a brief record is available through the Library catalog. Only a portion of the Archives Collection has extensive online guides found in the Archives Finding Aids that contain detailed descriptive information and lists of contents including the following new materials.

New Archives Finding Aids

Byron Johnson Papers WH1074

The papers of former Congressman Byron Johnson are filled with materials on transportation issues that were critical during the 1960s and 1970s. He was also heavily involved in developing innovative means of providing housing for seniors. One of the unusual aspects of his papers relate to a short-lived group that formed in 1967 called the National Conference for New Politics. The group was heavily against the Vietnam War and Johnson’s pacifist beliefs made him a natural for the group.

John Charles Notebooks WH54

The John Charles notebooks comprise eight field notebooks, from 1910-1913, of John Charles, Supervisor of Construction for the U.S. Indian Service, Department of the Interior. The notebooks include drawings and notes about buildings, bridges, waters supplies, and other facilities at Indian reservations and schools, chiefly in the Western U.S. In his notes he occasionally recorded the names and salaries of the staff.

Denver NeVaar – Sister Who Papers WH749

The Denver NeVaar – Sister Who Papers (WH749) follows the life of Denver NeVaar through his “spiritual alter-ego” Sister Who. In 1992, NeVaar produced a series of public access cable television programs beginning in Denver called “Sister Who Presents.” He produced the series while in Butte, Montana and resumed it when he returned to Denver in 2000. The materials in this collection include: videotapes, manuscripts, photographs, CDs of songs, performances, parades and other gay pride events.

Hidden Treasures

Tom Currigan Papers WH929

Mayor Tom Currigan’s papers include a wealth of information about the activists of the 1960s including Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, Rachel Noel, Bernie Valdez, Elvin Caldwell and others.

Swan Family Papers WH1181

The Swan Family papers include a short 16mm black and white film of the reenactment of 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn. The film was shot in 1926 and featured many of the surviving Indians who took part in the battle either as scouts for the army or members of the various tribes that defended the attack on their village.

Archives Donations

The Western History and Genealogy Department is home to over 4,000 Archival Collections having to do with the history of Colorado and the states west of the Mississippi. We have countless families, individuals, businesses, and organizations to thank for our Archival Collections, which contain original materials such as correspondence, business records, meeting minutes, speeches, legislative files, scrapbooks, journals, diaries, and photographs. The generosity of our donors has allowed countless researchers to glean one-of-a-kind information about Colorado and the West, and it has enabled generations of family members to visit the Library and learn about their ancestors. We consider our archival collections to be treasures of the Library, and we are grateful for the opportunity to preserve and provide access to them.

Western History Donations

Southwest Symposium – Mark Varien donated one box of records
Phillebaum – letter donated by Ellen Zazzarino
Cisneros, Roger – one box of professional and personal papers donated by Adelia Cisneros
Gonzales, Corky – three boxes of his writings and personal papers donated by Geraldine Gonzales
Williams, Carl M. – donated six boxes of his legislative records
Sanchez, Alfred – donated one box of his records
Mountain Plains Library Association – one box of the organization’s records donated by Judy Zelenski
Neale, Betty – donated one box of her legislative records
Anderson, John – donated 27 boxes of architectural records spanning his career
Ducker, Bruce – donated one box of his professional writings and related papers

Conservation Collection Donations

The Wilderness Society – one box of the organization's records donated by Ben Beach
The Wilderness Society: Four Corners Regional Office – donated eight boxes of records
The Nature Conservancy – donated three boxes of records

10th Mountain Division Donations

May, Richard T. – six Army maps and two German Army maps donated by Susan May
McCown, John – military papers donated by Susan McCown
10th Mountain Photo Collection – 67 photographic prints (copies) donated by Brian Linder
10th Mountain Photo Collection – Unit photograph 601st Field Artillery Battalion, Battery A donated by Dennis Cutter
10th Mountain Division Audio-Visual Collection – CD-ROM recording of memorial worship service, Hale and Farewell Reunion, August 2007 donated by Rev. Larry Fields
Kramer, Fritz – one box military, National Association papers donated by Gretl Kramer
Mindock, Stephen W. – donated Kiska, Camp Hale photographs
Baca, Frank C'de – Kiska invasion, occupation photographs donated by Frankie C'de Baca (son)

Mystery Photograph

We invite our readers to email answers to these questions about the unidentified photograph:

Who is it?
When was the picture taken?
Where was it taken?
Supplemental information?

There is no prize for an answer. In fact we ask for documentation of your answer. The readers who can provide the missing information will receive our thanks and a certificate recognizing them as an honorary reference librarian for the Western History/Genealogy Department of the Denver Public Library. Send your information to GenHist@denverlibrary.org and don’t forget to include the source of your information.

This month’s “Mystery Photograph” comes from the People’s Fair in its second or third year of operation at Morey Junior High School about 1973. Three folk musicians are picking and grinning, but there are no notes as to their identity. Thanks for helping clear up the mystery.

Information for Donors

Individuals, businesses, and organizations are welcome to contact the Library to discuss donating materials having to do with the history of Colorado and the West. Such materials may include, but are not limited to, original personal and professional correspondence, organizational and business records, meeting minutes, memos, speeches, legislative files, subject files, scrapbooks, journals/diaries, and photographs.

We are particularly interested in locating archival materials that document the following areas of state and regional history:

Colorado legislators and political figures
Ethnic groups, such as the Hispanic and Japanese American communities
Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender communities
Sports history and industry
Cultural and non-profit organizations
Native Americans
Notable historical families or individuals
Societies, clubs, and organizations

If you are interested in donating materials to the Library, please contact Erin Edwards, Acquisitions Specialist, 720-865-1810, eedwards@denverlibrary.org or check here for donation guidelines.

Volunteering

Volunteers are always welcome to assist with the processing of the Archives Collections and processing the related photographs. If you are interested in volunteering to help process Archives Collections, contact the volunteer office.

New Books in Western History Collection

Historians have identified water – or rather, a lack of it – as one of the central themes of Western history. Aridity is characteristic of large portions of the trans-Mississippi West, with a particularly notable exception in the Pacific Northwest. More aptly, the control of water as a resource, as a threat, and as an object of extraordinary political contention, has been a characteristic of Western history, sufficient to even become a touchstone of American popular culture.

Western historians have long been interested in the history of water rights, supply, and use. Anyone wading into the history of Western water does well to begin with Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), an essential expression of the aridity thesis. Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water, revised and updated edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1993) is an engaging popular history, and later became the foundation for a PBS series. Still relevant is A River Too Far: The Past and Future of the Arid West (Reno: Nevada Humanities Commission, distributed by the University of Nevada Press, 1991), edited by Joseph Finkhouse and Mark Crawford, illustrated with photographs from the Water in the West Project, and including essays by Patricia Nelson Limerick, Marc Reisner, Donald Worster, Roderick Nash, Wallace Stegner, and John McPhee.
For those interested in primary sources on Western water history, an extraordinary collection of digital materials, including text, images, audio, and video, is available through the Western Waters Digital Library, a project of the Great Western Library Alliance funded with monies from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
Students of Western water history have produced a broad array of works, but much of their late concern has been water as the conjunction of environmental and political history. Evan R. Ward's Border Oasis: Water and the Political Ecology of the Colorado River Delta, 1940-1975 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003) is one such study. Studies of the significance of water for urban development also abound, including Michael F. Logan’s Desert Cities: The Environmental History of Phoenix and Tucson (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006). Water, of course, has been integral to the development of agriculture, industry, and the other elements essential to supporting life in urban areas. But the support of aesthetically pleasing urban environments, including lawns, avenues, and parks, also has consequences for water use, a fact Paul Wesley Lander explores in Urban Landscape Aesthetics and Water Use in the Western United States (Ph.D. thesis, University of Colorado, 2005).
Water and tribal rights have been especially contentious, taking political conflicts over water to a different level with the collision of state, federal, and tribal sovereignties. John Thorson, Sarah Britton, and Bonnie Colby’s collection Tribal Water Rights: Essays in Contemporary Law, Policy, and Economics (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006) brings together recent essays by leading scholars, while their earlier Negotiating Tribal Water Rights: Fulfilling Promises in the Arid West (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005) is a study of water politics as it spills into Indian Country.
One of the most significant dimensions of water for tribal peoples has been the control of water, whether to harness it for hydroelectricity or hold it back in flood control, with attendant consequences of disruption to traditional and commercial fishing, or loss of lands under reservoirs. A classic work in this area, Michael L. Lawson's Dammed Indians: The Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux, 1944-1980 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1982) documents the disruption that followed Army Corps of Engineers' flood control efforts on the Missouri River from the New Deal to the late twentieth century.
Such massive efforts by the Corps of Engineers have also become a subject of study, one ably handled in David P. Billington and Donald C. Jackson's Big Dams of the New Deal Era: A Confluence of Engineering and Politics (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), which examines projects on the Colorado River (Boulder and Hoover dams), the Columbia River (Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams), as well as Pick-Sloan, the Shasta and Friant dams of central California, and the Garrison Dam in North Dakota. Donald J. Pisani's Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902-1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) examines the Bureau of Reclamation's role in Western water history during an earlier era. Steven C. Schulte's biography, Wayne Aspinall and the Shaping of the American West (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2002), explores the role of a Colorado politician in the controversial politics of water and land use.
But the politics of water has nowhere captured the imagination of historians and the public more than California, most certainly ever after Roman Polanksi's 1974 film, Chinatown, which screenwriter Robert Towne set around a largely fictionalized account of water in central and southern California. Catherine Mulholland, granddaughter of her subject, explores much the same ground as Towne's script in William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), striving to present a more accurate account of the era, something not every reviewer believed she had successfully done. Steven P. Erie's Beyond Chinatown: The Metropolitan Water District, Growth, and the Environment of Southern California (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006) presents a thorough and scholarly account of L.A. water politics, while Gary D. Libecap's Owens Valley Revisited: A Reassessment of the West's First Great Water Transfer (Stanford: Stanford Economics and Finance, 2007) examines the "theft" of water at the heart of Polanski's film.

New Books in the Genealogy Collection

The American Pioneers: Tackett-Tacket-Tackitt Families of America. Vols. 4-26, 1967-1989. G929.2 T119ame
Blair, Bob. The Blair Memorial: Written By, About, and for Blairs and Their Relations. G929.2 B575bLab 1991
Bockstruck, Lloyd DeWitt. Denizations and Naturalizations in the British Colonies in America, 1607-1775. G929.373 B631de 2005
Boso, Charles M. A View of Washington Bottom, a Glance at Biennerhassett Island [Wood Co., West Virginia]. G975.422 B652vi 1984
Brown, Rex. Polk County [Missouri] Court Docket. Book 1. 1837-1840; Book 2. 1840-1841; Book 3. 1842-1844; Book 4. 1844-1847; Book 5. 1847-1849; Book 6. 1850-1852. G929.377877 B814po 2006 6 vols.
Clement, John Chandler. Index of Denver, Colorado, Newspaper Obituaries and Funeral Notices. 2007. G929.378883 C591in 2007
Cook, Alice R. Haywood County, North Carolina Families. G929.375694 C771hay 1993
Dickinson, Philip George Murgatroyd. Historic Huntingdon. [Cambridgeshire, England]. G942.654 D56hi 1944
Drake, Paul. You Ought to Write All That Down: A Guide to Organizing and Writing Genealogical Narrative. G929.1072073 D789yo 1998
Fisher, Therese A. Marriage Records of the City of Fredericksburg, and of Orange, Spotsylvania, and Stafford Counties, Virginia, 1722-1850. G929.3755 F537mar 1990
Harris, Kate. Parkersburg: History of City from Time of its Settlement to the Present in Gripping Narrative. [Wood Co., West Virginia]. G975.422 H242par 1956
Haven, Doris. Smith Clan. G929.2 S643hav 1987
Herencia: The Quarterly Journal of the Hispanic Genealogical Research Center of New Mexico. Vol. 1. 1993 through Vol. 15. 2007. G929.3789 H421
Langhans, Rufus B. Huntington [New York] Court Records, 1659-1700 & the Duke’s Law 1664. G974.725 H926hu 1994
Langhans, Rufus B., ed. Place-names in the Town of Huntington [New York]: Their Location, Origin, and Meaning. G917.4725 P69 1988
Langhans, Rufus B. Records of the Overseers of the Poor; Addendum, 1729-1843 [Huntington, New York]. G974.725 H926re 1992 Supp.
Lapham, Elisabeth S. Echoes From the Past. [Suffolk Co., New York] G974.725 L314ec 1989
Lapham, Elisabeth S. Echoes From the Past. [Suffolk Co., New York] Vol. 2. G974.725 L3141ec 1989 v.2
Lowrie, Walter. Early Settlers of Missouri as Taken from Land Claims in the Missouri Territory. G929.3778 E12 1986
Macy, Harry Jr. Articles in the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, 1983-1995: Indexed by Principal Surname or Location. G974.7005 M259ar 1995
Maguire, Joseph C., Jr. Index of Obituaries and Marriages in the (Baltimore) Sun, 1861-1865. G929.3752 M2767in 2000
Mallick, Sallie A. Sketches of Citizens of Baltimore City and Baltimore County, Maryland. G929.37526 M296sk 2000
Mercer, Paul. Bibliographies and Lists of New York State Newspapers: An Annotated Guide. G071.47 A1mer 1981
Meyer, Mary Keysor. Baltimore City Birth Records, 1865-1894. G929.37526 M575baL 2000
Northcott, Dennis. Indiana Civil War Veterans: Transcriptions of the Death Rolls of the Department of Indiana, Grand Army of the Republic, 1882-1948. G929.3772 N814in 2005
O’Neill, Francis P. Index of Obituaries and Marriages in the (Baltimore) Sun, 1866-1870, with Addendum 1861-1865. G929.3752 O5872in 2002
O’Neill, Francis P. Index of Obituaries and Marriages in the (Baltimore) Sun, 1871-1875. 2 vols. Vol. 1, A-J; vol. 2. K-Z. G929.3752 O5872in2 2001
O’Neill, Francis P. Index of Obituaries and Marriages in the (Baltimore) Sun, 1876-1880. G929.3752 O5872in3 2007
Ostertag, John A. 1912 Nemaha County, Kansas Atlas. G912.781332 O855ni 1992
Quakertown: History of a Very Interesting Portion of Wood County [West Virginia]: Early Families and Their Descendants-Good Deeds of the Quakers, Incidents and Anecdotes. G975.422 Q24 1900
Romero, Carolyn M. Living a Legacy: Descendants of Juan de Jesus Vigil and Maria Romana Bustos. G929.2 V683rom 2007
Schultz, Ken. Frontier Airlines Memorial List. G387.7092 S3875fr 2007
Sherman, Renee Britt. Brooke County, Virginia/West Virginia Licenses and Marriages, 1797-1874. G929.375413 S553br 1991
Stein, Lou. Clues to Our Family Names: How Did They Begin? What do They Mean? G929.42 S819cL 1988
Stock, Thomas Allen. Nissequogue [New York]: A Journey. G974.725 S8645ni 1986
Taylor, Philip Fall. A Calendar of the Warrants for Land in Kentucky: Granted for Service in the French and Indian War. G929.3769 K4197caLg 1991
Tolzmann, Don Heinrich. Missouri’s German Heritage. 2nd ed. G977.800431 M691 2006
Ulster Historical Foundation. Familia [Belfast, Northern Ireland; library owns vol. 15, 1999 through vol. 23, 2007] G929.1072041 F22
Waters, Margaret Ruth. Indiana Land Entries. [vol. 1 Cincinnati District, 1801-1840 - vol. 2. Vincennes District, part 1, 1807-1877] G929.3772 W317in 1977
Willerton, Dorian, et al. The Genealogy of the Nichol Family: A Sketch. G929.2 N514ge 1950
Winterbottom, John J. Mt. Olivet Cemetery, Baltimore, Maryland: Caretaker Records. 3 vols. G929.57526 W734mt 2000
Zimmerman, Elaine Obbink. Interment Records, 1883-1929, Lorraine Park Cemetery & Mausoleum. G929.575271 Z655in 1995
Zoellner, Tom. Homemade Biography: How to Collect, Record, and Tell the Life Story of Someone You Love. G809.93592 Z73no 2007
Zook, Lois Ann. Index to the 1875 Combination Atlas Map of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. G912.74815 E93ei Index

Denver Public Library Genealogical News and Events Calendar

Colorado Genealogical Society Classes and Events

Previous Newsletters

March 2007, April 2007, May/June 2007, July 2007, August 2007, September 2007, October 2007, December 2007, January 2008, February 2008, March 2008, April 2008, May 2008, June 2008, July 2008

View Slide Show

The empty Denver Auditorium ready for the 1908 Democratic National Convention. McClure photo MCC-1227

The Mizpah arch at Denver’s Union Station. McClure photo MCC-1658

The exterior of the Denver Auditorium in 1908 site of the Democratic National Convention, with people entering for the convention. McClure photo MCC-3797

Snow “imported” from the Colorado Rockies to impress upon the 1908 Democratic National Convention visitors that a different world was only a short drive from Denver.

Postcard celebrating the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Souvenir program of the 1908 Democratic National Convention showing the back of the Mizpah sign at Denver’s Union Station.