The grant was given in the form of a challenge grant and the Crook County Historical Society will supply the remaining funds to purchase the machine. The museum houses one of Central Oregon s best research libraries including hundreds of books and other printed materials such as genealogies, biographies, descriptions, directories, catalogs, and personal manuscripts such as letters, diaries, journals, memoranda, reminiscences, and service records. One of the museum s most important, useful and most utilized collections is the microfilm archive of over a hundred years of Crook County newspapers. This indexed collection is a wonderful resource to local and out of area students, historians and genealogists. With the extraordinary growth in interest in history and in genealogy it is the research function of the museum that has become one of the most important and most utilized.
Genealogy is one of the fastest growing hobbies in the United States.
The new machine is now available to the public. Spring hours for the museum are Tuesday through Friday 10 to 5, Saturday 11 to 4. The presenter is Gail Wells. Cosponsoring the series with us again this year is the Friends of Crook County Library. Some of you may remember that from 1933 through 1951, a series of major fires struck Oregon s Tillamook country, burning 355,000 acres of virgin forest.