Oregon State Archives News

Volunteers Honored for Long Hours of Service



	Volunteer Daraleen Wade (right) is congratulated by Secretary of State Bill Bradbury (left) and State Archivist Mary Beth Herkert during a reception in the gallery of the Archives Building.

Secretary of State Bill Bradbury and the staff of the Oregon State Archives honored Archives volunteers Thursday, August 30th during a reception at the Archives Building.

Daraleen Wade was recognized for 15 years of service to the Archives. Long interested in history and genealogy, Daraleen has ancestors who came to Oregon in early the 1840s. She has translated her interest into a number of very useful genealogy resources, compiling and publishing of volumes on Marion County probates and marriages as well as several volumes on cemeteries in Marion County. Daraleen volunteered for many years at the East Family History Center in Salem and longtime staff at the Archives knew her as a regular researcher in the old State Archives facility on Broadway Street. When the Archives moved to the new building on Summer Street, the volunteer program was expanded and Daraleen started her service at the Archives in 1992.

Since that time, Daraleen has volunteered an average of 20 hours per week to the Archives. She has worked at everything from flattening and re-boxing records to creating indexes and doing data entry for the online index on the Archives Web site (This index now has over 600,000 entries). She even traveled around the state with a regular paid staff member one summer to help inventory records in various courthouses as part of a project to make information about county records more readily available. That project is the foundation for the online Guide to Historical County Records found on the Archives Web site.

In addition to her own efforts, Daraleen has been a champion for the volunteer program and has recruited many of the volunteers who work at the Archives now. Most of these people have been with the Archives for 10 years and provide invaluable assistance to the institution's efforts to make information more accessible.

Other volunteers honored at the reception include Mimi Stang, Betty Winn, Kris Leake, Bryce Sawyer, Margaret Hoffman, Harriet Miller, and Kristine Condra. The staff of the Archives thanks these dedicated volunteers for their invaluable service to the history of the state. Anyone interested in volunteering is encouraged to contact Layne Sawyer at 503-378-5198 or layne.g.sawyer@state.or.us