Make Friends with an Archivist

Bradley family circa 1910 from auther's collection Back: Patrick Thomas Bradley, Agnes Bradley Kircher, Elizabeth Bradley, Kathryn Murphy, Kate Bradley Murphy, Rosella Graham, Hilary Patrick Bradley, Mary Ahern Bradley, Mary Frances Kircher. Front: Miriam "Brownie" Bradley, Thomas Graham Bradley

It just can’t be said enough.  Make friends with an archivist.  The archivists I know are a special breed – history geeks with a penchant for organizing things and a yen to ferret out obscure and unseen treasures.  They have so many resources at their disposal, and their job is to share! 
 
I am writing a family sketch on my great-grandparents, Tom and Mary (Ahern) Bradley for my ProGen study course.  The Bradley’s settled in Tiburon, California just as Tom’s employer, the California Northwestern Railroad (later the Northwestern Pacific), moved its terminus there around 1890.  Their children and grandchildren grew up in Tiburon.  The Bradley family had many connections with this small town on San Francisco Bay.
 
I knew the Belvedere-Tiburon Landmark’s Society had some materials in their archive that my father and some of his siblings had donated, so I checked their catalog online and found a few items pertinent to my research, including a couple of oral histories.  I reached out to the archivist, and boy, did I ever get lucky!
 
Dave Gotz emailed some documents and photographs including a transcript of an oral history interview with my great-aunt Miriam “Brownie” Bradley.  He’s put a few more things in the mail to me.  He’s answering questions that continue to pop into my mind, and now that he knows I exist, he’s even sending me cool materials from the Society’s collection – pictures and newspaper clippings that I didn’t even know existed.  But he did.  Because he’s an archivist!
 
The best treasure that arrived yesterday was a link to a video file of an oral history interview with my aunts Mary King and Sr. Bertha Kircher, recorded in October 1994.  Mary died in 1996 and Bertha in 1999 but for half an hour yesterday I had these two dear women visiting with me in my living room telling me stories of Tiburon a century ago.  Seeing them as I so fondly remember them, hearing their voices and unique ways of talking brought back a flood of my own childhood memories.
 
Make friends with an archivist.  They’re waiting with a treasure for you!