Written Documents

Museums collect a variety of things and depending on the museum that variety may be narrowed down more than others. Here at the Western Heritage Museum Complex we collect items relating to Southeastern New Mexico and the surrounding regions. Some of the most important things in our collection are written documents. Writing is a very important development for humans. Writing really marks the difference between history and pre-history. Because of these written documents we have firsthand accounts of events, lists of who and what was where (census), and much more. One of the pieces on display at the Museum is a copy of a wedding license from 1859. This license comes from the Virgil and Thelma Linam Collection and belonged to Charles Holbert Eller and Martha Jane Snow who were the maternal grandparents of Thelma. Their license is from the state of Texas and dates from December 19, 1859.

There seems to be controversy about the legality and morality of state-issued marriage licenses but I’m not going to go into that. To me and to the Museum, something like a marriage license is a record of where these people were at a specific time and who they married and since it has their names it can lead us to who their families were as well. Thankfully we have Thelma’s book, Life on the Prairies: Settling the Llano Estacado, where she traces her lineage back, but if we didn’t, this marriage license would become a clue to their family history! Thanks to written documents like this and family Bibles, family trees, census, and other forms of documentation we can track people and even trace family histories. Genealogy is the study of family pedigree, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, and genealogists use these sorts of documents to conduct their research. Therefore, museums, libraries, archives, and other repositories for written documents become crucial to the study of someone’s family history.

The Smithsonian Museum coined the term “The Nation’s Attic” implying that museums were a place for people to store their items, but recently they changed their image and would like to be seen as “The Nation’s Treasure Chest.” A treasure chest implies that there is an adventure waiting and that at the end of the adventure you are going to get something wonderful. This applies to all museums. A museum can be an adventure and there are so many treasures to discover such as a marriage license which could lead you on another adventure of discovering your family history. To see this and other treasures stop by the Western Heritage Museum Complex and Lea County Cowboy Hall of Fame!