Denver Public Library digitizing important frontier documents

Although my ancestors did not arrive in Colorado until the late 1930s, I am very interested in the digitization efforts of the Denver Public Library, and particularly interested in how the neighborhoods developed. A recent article in the Denver Post, "Library to preserve documents of 19th-century Denver," reports more than 100 volumes of documents housed in the Denver Public Library can tell when great-great-grandma married great-great-granddad and where they lived and how their frontier neighborhood developed.

Now these fragile books, dating from 1859 to 1900, are being digitized for "an excellent resource for our genealogy and house history customers," said Jim Kroll, the manager of the library's Western History/Genealogy Department.

The digital "repository of private and public records" will detail the stories of each Denver community, he said. The digitized records will be accessible through the library's web site. The records I need between 1939 to the present have been harder than hen's teeth to acquire through the county, so I have looked to the marvelous Denver Public Library and have great interest in their continued efforts.

Denver Public Library grant holds promise

As a Denver native, an article in the Cherry Creek News, "Digitizing Denver's Historic neighborhoods," was of interest. The Institute of Museum and Library Services has awarded the Denver Public Library's Western History/Genealogy Department a grant in the amount of $778,000 for the Library's Creating Communities: Digitizing Denver's Historic Neighborhoods project.

"We are extremely pleased that the Denver Public Library will become the home of the archival records of the City of Denver," said Jim Kroll, manager of the Western History/Genealogy Department. "The project will create a centralized digital repository of materials about Denver."

According to Kroll, manuscripts, photographs, published narrative, cartography, audio and video recordings and newspaper clippings from private sources will be linked with the public records to provide in- depth information about the history of Denver and its neighborhoods.