Early Franklin County Settlers

    Doris Parks Elder, Ottawa, began documenting Franklin County’s earliest settlers around 1970. She worked on the project as she had time over the next thirty years. Doris came by her interest in local history naturally.  Her father, Hobart Parks, was very interested in Ottawa’s history and indexed Ottawa’s early newspapers.

    Doris’s emphasis was on pre-1870 residents.  She first recorded the information that she gathered in a series of red notebooks, organized by family. As the project grew, she switched to index cards so that an exact alphabetical listing of all the names could be made. All of the names in the notebooks are on the cards and in the following list, but not all names in the list are in the notebooks. Both the notebooks and the cards are in Ottawa Library’s Local History Reference collection.

    Doris indexed both materials in paper and on microfilm in the library’s collections, and added some information from District Court files and from Franklin County Historical Society Archives as well.  The result is a wealth of information about Franklin County’s earliest documented residents. The volume of genealogy requests is such that library staff can no longer undertake research, though they will be happy to guide and assist researchers who visit the library in person. Researchers from outside the area who wish to contract for local research from this or other sources should contact Franklin County Genealogical Society, P.O. Box 353, Ottawa, KS 66067. Their fees are currently $10.00/hour plus photocopy charges and postage. Franklin County Historical Society will research their files with the same fee schedule. Mail to Franklin County Historical Society, P.O. Box 145, Ottawa, KS 66067

    For many years, the card file was the only existing copy of Doris’s work.  In the summer of 2003, Alena Loyd transcribed the data from the cards into electronic format so that it might be posted on the Internet. She and the librarians attempted to translate Doris’s abbreviations of where the information resides.  They have figured out most of them, but occasionally one still stumps them.

    Ottawa Library thanks Loyd Builders, Ottawa, for helping to fund this project in memory of Virginia Loyd, another dedicated researcher.

Barbara Dew, Library Director

October 2003

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