Working on Historical Documents

I’ve been going through four-drawer filing cabinets in the Local History section of our local Alamosa Public Library to help sorting through the files.  Remember I use to work here my last five years before retirement.  We called those “vertical files” and the genealogical clerk kept newspaper articles in folder in there as well as other historical papers. 

I’ve been volunteering and going through the files doing a preliminary sorting of what to keep and digitize, what to give other entities and what to throw… the librarian will do the final sorting.

It has been so interesting seeing some of the old documentations.  Part of the documentation I found was an old cemetery book with entries in beautiful penmanship.  Some entries are straight forward with name, birth and death dates and maybe the reason for the death. 

Other entries go into great details and actually tell the story of the person and death.

Of course these cemetery records will be saved and maybe even digitized. 

There was a form called a State Land Inventory where parcels of land was identified and attached were family stories of the property.  Reading those stories were so interesting.  Some talked about how they came about purchasing the property and some talked about going to school or how they washed clothes or taking a trip to town that took all day.

I have another day or two to get through all 12 drawers and will get that done before we move up to South Fork for the summer….sometime in early June.

Remember, you are loved.