Laramie Plains Museum Helps Community Remember the Past

The Laramie Plains Museum will be hosting its annual preservation week between April 22^nd-April 28^th.  The Laramie Plains Museum has multiple events throughout the week that the public can attend. The events are focused around teaching the basics of preserving family heirlooms and documents.

If you can only make it to one Preservation Week event, make sure it is the kick-off. The Preservation Week kick-off is from 2-4 p.m. at the Alice Hardie Stevens Center. The event is free and open to the public. This event will let visitors dip their feet into a little bit of everything that preservation week will cover.  Fifteen exhibitors will be demonstrating how to preserve family photos, heirlooms, and books. Exhibitors will also showcase Wyoming history and provide hands-on activities for children.  Laramie Plains Museum Historian Jerry Hansen will also be on hand to evaluate family photos and suggest preservation options.  The Wyoming Quilt Project will also be on hand document quilts created before 1945, which will then be registered in the national Quilt Index website. Reservations are required for quilts. After the kick-off, there will be a book discussion of the People of the Book by Geraldine Brook’s led by the Albany County Public Library. This event runs from 4:30-6 p.m. at the Alice Hardie Stevens Center and is free.

Monday’s events are focused around family history and include information sessions on preserving family papers (American Heritage Center, 1-2 p.m.), creating a special in-home family library (American Heritage Center, 2-3 p.m), and how to trace your family line (Wyoming Union Family Room, 7-9 p.m.).  All these events are free and open to the public.

Tuesday’s event take a more modern approach to preservation. The first event focuses on how to preserve your electronic information.  While a Facebook page may not seem to contain a lot of valuable information, three for four generations from now may appreciate learning from it.  This free session is hosted at the American Heritage Center from 1-2 p.m. Immediately following that session at the same location, the American Heritage Center will talk about how they preserve the artifacts in their archives.

On Wednesday, the Laramie Plains Museums is sponsoring the opportunity to research home records and ownership.  Between 1:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. at the Albany Country Courthouse, participants can research who previous own their homes and what renovations were done and when.

With a more local and regional focus in mind, Friday’s events center around ranch preservation and a historical walking tour of downtown Laramie.  The ranch preservation presentation is at the Alice Hardie Stevens Center from 2-4 p.m. and is free.  Reservations are encouraged for the historical walking tour of downtown Laramie, which departs from the First Street Plaza on the corner of First and Grand. Tickets are $10 in advanced or $15 at the time of the tour. The tour departs at 6 p.m.

Preservation Week wraps up on Saturday with the opening of a new exhibit at the Wyoming Territorial Prison and a lecture on genealogy.  The new exhibit is called Science on the Range and tells the story of the University of Wyoming Experiment Stock Station Farm’s research on farming and ranching impacts. The event is between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. and is free. The genealogy lecture is at the Albany Country Public Library from 1-3 p.m.

More information can be found online.