Earlier this month, the Utah State Historical Records Advisory Board (USHRAB) met to review applications for 2023-2024 grant funding. Thanks to the newly implemented draft period, the Board received polished and engaging applications. With roughly $29,000 to give, the Board received requests for well over $40,000! We are now happy to announce this year’s winners. 

The Alf Engen Ski Museum

The Alf Engen Ski Museum was awarded $3,723 to preserve a collection of approximately 60 DVDs/CDs, 2 boxes of VHS tapes, and 10 floppy disk records that are vital to the history of the museum. These records include original historical ski and snow sports footage, primarily from the Intermountain Region, self-produced documentaries and slideshows that were created by early ski historians in the 1980s to early 2000s (including video and photos from the 1950s to early 2000s), original and documentary footage from the annual Ski Hall of Fame event from 2002 to about 2010, and institutional records from the founding and first 10 years of the Alf Engen Ski Museum Foundation. The focus of this project is to organize, catalog, and digitize the AESM’s collection of digital historic record archives in order to make them publicly accessible through the website and better fulfill the museum’s mission.

The Emery County Archives

The Emery County Archives was awarded $4,152 to digitize and preserve Ferron-Molen irrigation company records, dating from 1886–1957. These records contain the minutes, policies, and procedures, names of stockholders, descriptions of the location of historic canals, ditches, and their names, and a lawsuit for water rights between Ferron and San Pete County. Ten folders contain the Articles of Incorporation of four irrigation companies with the Oaths of Office for the officers of the Ferron Canal. These records will be digitized by University of Utah’s Marriott Library and made available online for public access.

Park City Museum

Park City Museum was awarded $7,500 toward the final stage of the digitization of thousands of images documenting the bridge between the historical mining town and a modern, world-class ski resort town. Kendall Webb, local photographer, maintained a business in Park City for nearly thirty years. His work, which consists of everything from studio portraits to high school football games, weddings to Boy Scout trips, is a one-of-a-kind window into Park City between the 1940s-1970s, a time when the town saw immense change. Webb’s images capture the shift between a declining mining industry and the beginnings of winter sports tourism and are one of the most important collections documenting the area’s history. The Museum will be partnering with the University of Utah’s Marriott Library for digitization work, and the images will be available for viewing, along with thousands of others already digitized with previous grant funds, on the Mountain West Digital Library.

Moab Museum

Moab Museum was awarded $7,435 to digitize the Channel 6 News Archive, a collection of VHS tapes consisting of approximately 1,200 hours of film representing 2,200 individual news broadcasts of a seminal period of time in Moab’s history from 1989 to 2000. Each tape contains approximately two hours of footage. The Channel 6 Moab News Archive contains footage of historic icons and events including a 1992 interview with the man dubbed the “Uranium King,” Charlie Steen, who discusses Moab and southeast Utah during the peak of the uranium boom. Additionally, the archive documents personal stories about the collapse of the mining and milling industry, mass exodus, and efforts to build a tourism-based economy. The VHS tapes will be converted to digital file formats and hosted online for public viewing.

Tooele County Clerk’s Office

Tooele County Clerk’s Office was awarded $2,250 to preserve historical marriage certificates dating from 1867. Historic marriage applications have information showing the history of the people in this county such as the applicants and their parents’ place of birth, occupation and race/nationality. Marriage licenses contain dates of application, wedding, and when it was filed. Some marriage licenses contain the signature of Prophets and Apostles and other prominent people from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints which would be of great significance to some of the residents in the county and state.

Weber State University Stewart Library

Weber State University’s Stewart Library was awarded $7,200 to catalog, preserve, and digitize historic papers, photographs, baptism and membership records, and memorabilia of the New Zion Baptist Church from 1916 to 2020. Historically, the church was the first African American church in Utah. Members would come from all over Utah to attend the church, with the majority of the membership coming from Salt Lake City, Weber, and Davis Counties. Now 107 years old, the church has created historical records of baptisms, memberships, church history, photographs and memorabilia. The library will upload the collection into CONTENTdm to make it available to the public through their Digital Collections, Mountain West Digital Library and the Digital Public Library of America. They will also add the finding aid of the collection to ArchivesSpace.

The USHRAB’s grant program is funded by a State Board Programming Grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission at the National Archives. The USHRAB assists public and private non-profits, as well as non-Federal government entities throughout the State of Utah in the preservation and use of historical records.