A Paper, a Packet, and a Past

My daughter came home from junior high with an extra credit assignment—fill out a family tree going back to her great-grandparents. She set the blank papers on my desk and headed off with her girlfriend.

I picked up the papers, realizing that I wasn’t even sure what town in Idaho my father had been born in—or the maiden names of my grandmothers.

So I called my mother. She gave me some names, places and dates and suggested I call my father’s sisters because they had spent a week at the National Archives in the 1960s.

A few days later a packet arrived in the mail filled with old census records, letters, family notes, and a small booklet titled Camp Dynamo of ’86 and Camp History.

The Booklet Cover

That is when I found Annie (Graves) Callahan Taylor—the great-grandmother that two old men on the Salmon River insisted I belonged to some sixteen years before. The Grandmother of my father and his siblings who'd dismissed her as 'crazy'. Well, crazy people don't get a booklet to commemorate them after they die.

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I completed my daughter’s assignment, then wanted to know more about all the people in the papers my Aunt sent, besides names and a few dates. And especially Annie. How does a single woman who’s teaching school end up in the Rocky Mountains alone back in the pioneer days?

This was before the internet. Research meant libraries, courthouse records, and long evenings studying microfilm. Fortunately, I had a friend with a small library of genealogical research books who helped me learn how to begin. And there were local librarians who helped me find microfilm I could borrow.

What started as a school assignment slowly grew into a lifelong search for the people whose lives shaped my own.

Through the help of my local librarian, I was able to order early copies of Idaho Recorder newspaper on microfilm and discovered that Annie Graves Callahan was one of Idaho's first female journalists and historian of Lemhi County, writing the history of Shoup's early days, and of the first mines. She didn't write from a distance, she wrote from the mining camp wherein she would live out her life. Very few people did, aside from those who died young.

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The stories on this site are the result of forty years of research, travel, study, compiling and writing.

My daughter got her extra-credit—I recieved a life-long passion and at long last, a place to put it all. I hope you enjoy visiting SECrie.com. If you are new to this site, consider starting with Down the Salmon River—the life story of Annie Crie Graves who authored the earliest history of Shoup, Idaho and the early mines downriver.