On 5 June 2015, the Funeral Service will be held at the Riverview Chapel for Ruth Bishop who passed away in Portland OR. She will be interred with her family in Salem OR. With great sorrow I heard the news. She had two loves–her own personal genealogy and the Conner-Bishop Library she started a number of years ago in Portland.
Now the Conner-Bishop Collection is in Tremonton, Utah in the Genealogy Library Center, Inc. Later this month, we will finish the bathroom in the Library building in downtown Tremonton. And paint the walls. Then we can begin assembling the shelves to hold the more than 70,000 volumes which Ruth and her associates collected. These volumes are shrink-wrapped on pallets.
Eventually, my own Library collection of almost 20,000 volumes will join the fun. At present, my library is still at my home–where the last three weeks we have had an inch or more of rain per day! Something unheard of in our semi-desert state. And we are in the midst of a huge drought!
And you guessed it–all that water had to go somewhere, so it filled my stairwell and then leaked through the door and flooded the basement. Miracles happen with genealogy collections all the time. And during the month of May 2015, we got very wet carpets. And no damage to the 20,000 volumes and the 12 files full-sized file cabinets filled with genealogy files. Or, the more than 25 small file drawers with 4 years of research while I was completing my PhD at the University of Utah.
Papers and cards and photos and files were all dry!
Now I have to determine how to clean the carpets or whether to pull them up and throw them out.
When compared to the flooding in Texas and parts of the Mid-West–we got off lightly. And for that miracle, I am profoundly happy. Your favorite genealogist, Arlene Eakle
PS Stay tuned for a list of the new collections I have received the last several months–some really exciting stuff!