Colletta Seminar

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Dr. John Phillip Colletta

Sept. 22, 2018 at beautiful Salish Hall on the Green River College Campus, Auburn


The day began with coffee, tea, books, raffle items and a great Silent Auction John Philip Colletta, PhD., began the day by introducing us to archives, libraries and manuscript repositories, discussing who created the records or documents and where we might find them. After a thorough introduction, he dove into several research cases, which included the records and how he found them. This was very enlightening, because so often we find one piece of evidence but never follow up to find the records and story behind the notation in an index, or sentence in a book.

Before lunch, we traveled through the Library of Congress, and what research one can do in each of the specialized Reading Room/Research Centers. After lunch, we learned of some Lesser Used Federal Record, which provide detail about our ancestor's lives and biographies, rather than lineage. The amount of information one can find is astounding!

Dr. Colletta presented an example of a lawsuit which one of his relatives filed against a steamboat. In that filing was a very complete story from the plaintiff, which the judge disregarded, saying as the steamboat captain had said, “she should have locked the door.” On appeal the case did go up to the federal court, which is how Dr. Colletta found it in the standard The Federal Cases, 1789-1880 which will be found in any law library. We are fortunate to have the Public Law Library of King County at 401 4th Avenue North, in Kent! It is open from 8:30 to 5 Monday through Friday. http://www.pllkc.org/wp/contact-us/

By the way, that case established the precedent that on public carriers, that if you check a bag, the carrier is responsible for loss or damage. However, if you carry it on, *you* are responsible for your property.

The talks were lively, informative, full of illustrations Colletta had found in archives, libraries and manuscript collections. Since our focus was on immigrants, all of the cases presented were of migrants and how we can find records of these ancestors and other relatives and their interactions with government, and how to find and use those records to build a narrative which brings to life those who came became before us. I'm sure that the stories we can glean this way will captivate our families and get them interested in carrying on the work of family history research.

Attendees left with more than memories of the talks and good notes. Many of us also won raffle prizes and silent auction items. Dr. Colletta's syllabus is very complete and well laid-out to aid in note-taking and provide all the bibliography one needs to follow up.

Heritage Quest had tables-full of books, maps and other genealogy goodies, including copies of Dr. Colletta’s books.



A great day was had by all! Thank you to Dr. Colletta for flying out from Washington, D.C. and to the Seminar Committee for doing the hard work of organizing and preparing this seminar.



Seminar photos courtesy of Katie Hanzeli
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                               Valorie Zimmerman                              

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