Our family’s collection at the American Heritage Center

Way back in December, 2022, I visited the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. I donated collections of letters, photographs, and employment records belonging to P.W. Pearson and J.W. Johnson. Last week, I was informed that the collections had (finally) been catalogued and a finding aid prepared.

Here’s some background on my strategy for donating materials and how the process actually worked in practice.

One of my goals post-retirement has been to continuously explore how my family history artifacts and research might best be preserved for future generations. I have some stuff that has appeal beyond just my immediate family – materials that might have some lasting historical value. So far, I’ve identified three such collections. Two of them were for my Pearson/Brodd family, and one was for my Frasier/Campbell family.

My first task was to identify which institutions might be the logical place to hold these collections. I was mindful of two things: what geographical location makes sense for the donated materials – where will future generations be looking for our family papers? And the second consideration was the long-term viability of the institution and whether they have the resources to properly catalog and store fragile documents.

My Pearson/Brodd papers were two somewhat separate collections. One was for J.W. Johnson, my 3x-great-uncle. He was the first person on my Brodd side of the family to emigrate to the United States. He then helped my great-great-grandparents, Anders Gustaf and Gustafva Brodd, in their emigration arrangements and secured employment for them at the coal mine in Carbon, Wyoming. Refer my post about “Another Trip to Carbon” for more information. I had quite a number of letters written by him as well as various photos of the Johnson family. The other collection was all of my great-grandfather P.W. Pearson’s railroad-related papers, including time slips, job certifications, and other materials related to his work on the Union Pacific Railroad. For more information about P.W. Pearson, refer to the page on my family tree site dedicated to P.W. Pearson.

I wanted to donate the Johnson materials because for one thing, he is not in my direct line of ancestry. I wanted to make sure that his descendants both now and in the future have access to this material and that they wouldn’t have to depend on finding me or my descendants to learn about their own ancestor. Secondly, J.W. Johnson was a Wyoming State Senator and thus a historical figure. Having his papers housed at the American Heritage Center would ensure that Wyoming historians would have ready access to this material should it be needed for future research.

The Pearson papers were strictly related to P.W. Pearson’s time with the Union Pacific Railroad. He had kept the carbon copies of all of his time records. I also had a letter of recommendation, some certificates for attaining certain job qualifications (brakeman, engineer, etc.), and some log books and instruction manuals. I felt like the collection painted a rich picture of a typical railroad engineer of the time and would be of interest to people engaged in research of railroad workers. Some of this material – the log books and time slips especially – were in poor condition and likely to further deteriorate without professional care.

I identified the American Heritage Center as the best institution for receiving these materials. All of the donated materials were mostly related to the portion of their lives spent in Laramie, Wyoming which is where the American Heritage Center is located. This met my first criteria for geographic location. The Center is affiliated with the University of Wyoning and is well-funded and housed in a dedicated facility with trained professional staff, meeting my second criteria for institutional viability. I contacted them and made an appointment to visit. They sent me a sample “Deed of Gift” document that transfers ownership of donated materials to them. Before traveling up there, I made sure that I had my own digital copies of everything to be donated. I also wrote up a couple of short biographies for the two men. I organized the papers as best I could into chronological order and tried to identify everyone in the photographs.

I traveled there on a chilly December day in 2022. The AHC is housed in a unique building shaped like a mountain, designed by renowned architect Antoine Predock.

I met with the Head of Collection Management to review the materials I intended to donate. He agreed that they met the criteria for their archives. I was asked to sign the Deed of Gift form, which I did. The form certifies that I was the rightful owner of the materials, and that I was irrevocably transferring ownership to the archives. There was a space on the form for “disposition instructions”, should the institution decide during the cataloguing process that they didn’t want some portion of the collection. Here, I instructed that any unwanted materials be returned to me rather than destroyed.

I was told it would take several months before the collections would be fully catalogued and processed and indeed it did – I only got notified last week that the Finding Aid had finally been prepared.

A “Finding Aid” is a standardized type of document that archivists use to describe and catalog a record collection. A well-written Finding Aid will make it easy for researchers to find document collections and decide if they want to inspect the records further. Also, by using a standard Finding Aid format, the description of the collection can be saved in standard archive databases, making it even easier for people to find the materials. 

The Finding Aid for my collections is housed in one such archive database here: https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv994134. It is now part of the Archives West network, a digital hub that serves archival institutions across the mountain west. Note that the Finding Aid has a lot of clues to help future researchers – for example, it links this material to Saunders County, Nebraska. Finding Aids leave a lot of “bread crumbs” to help future researchers find this information.

I thought I understood originally that all of my donated materials would be digitized. I don’t know if I misunderstood or if their policies have changed in the interim. Turns out they aren’t digitized. What if you wanted to see the collection but can’t travel to Wyoming? Turns out you can schedule an appointment to view the materials via a Zoom session with an archivist. They have many other tools for viewing materials and resources remotely. So that’s pretty cool! If during a Zoom session you decide you want digital copies, they can be made available for a reasonable fee.

My Frasier/Campbell collection is currently being processed by the Wisconsin Historical Society. I’ll write about that experience once that Finding Aid is online.

All in all, I thought this was a great experience. I feel good that these materials are in good hands and that future researchers and genealogists can readily find them. So far, the three collections I’ve donated represent just a small fraction of the family history materials filling my home office. I think I can identify a handful of other collections worthy of donation to other archives. But everything else will have to be handed off to future family genealogists. I’m doing my best to get them organized and digitized to maximize their usefullness.