Boulder – To most college students, instant messages, or IMs, are about as ephemeral as the topics they typically address.
One flicker and gone.
Ethan Cowan, a 20-year-old cinema-studies major, saves his IMs on his computer to read again later. But in his family, that is no surprise.
Cowan comes from a long line of savers – really, really dedicated savers.
“It’s in the genes,” said his mother, Linda Cowan.
Beginning more than 200 years ago, Cowan’s family has kept the messages – people called them letters in those days – written to one another, as well as correspondence with eminent outsiders like Ralph Waldo Emerson, sermons given by preachers in the family and multipart essays sent home while traveling.
The collection, at least 75,000 documents totaling hundreds of thousands of pages filling 200 boxes, is one of the largest private family troves that has turned up in recent years, genealogy experts say.
It has been stored in attics, sheds and storage lockers over the years, and most recently in the Cowans’ home in Boulder, where they were interviewed on a recent morning.
Its contents cover the scandalous (a relative jailed for embezzlement), the intriguing (a runaway slave seeking refuge in the North) and the historic (the settling of Chicago).
Now the current owner of the collection, Cowan’s grandmother, Mary Leslie Wolff, who is 82, is negotiating to donate the papers – called the Ames Family Historical Collection, for her father’s branch of the tree – to a historical society somewhere back East, where the family began. Wolff declined to say where the collection might go because discussions were continuing.
Historians and librarians say the collection is probably as remarkable for its intellectual vigor as for its age and size.
It is essentially a dialogue of history: one well-educated, middle-class family’s long conversation, and its interaction with the issues that defined the early nation and its westward tide.
“Whenever anyone finds a record like this that speaks to one family in depth, it’s a gold mine,” said David Ouimette, who manages the genealogy collection for the Family History Library, run by the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City.
Why this family saved the things that many others threw away or lost remains a mystery, Wolff said.
“I think a lot of people have the urge, but at some point they just give up and throw it out,” she said.
Linda Cowan spoke up. “These people didn’t – they didn’t throw out anything.”