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Offline AngeloRayTopic starter
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« on: April 27, 2011, 01:11:41 pm »
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Hello folks,

At the March treasure show in Conroe, Texas I gave a lecture over this topic and received excellent feedback from it. I thought I would post a summary of it on this website so that other treasure hunters could learn from it as well.

I am an historical archivist at the West Texas Collection at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, and being a metal dectorist and History Major, I was thrilled when I started my current position about two years ago. After working at the archives, I was shocked to discover how much information a treasure hunter or researcher could find at such a location.

Historical archives are a treasure in themselves! The information contained in such locations includes letters, documents, maps, out of print books, rare books, artifacts, photographs, etc. all from usually the surrounding areas. Archives are generally opened to the public and will usually have professional historians and History Major students employed and happy to assist one in research anyway they can. Lost treasure stories all have some type of historical background and usually are said to have been buried by a road, natural landmark, etc. but in order to find a treasure one has to have a knowledge of the history of the area that it was buried at.

Take, for instance, if a treasure story claimed that a band of robbers in the Old West days held up a train or stage coach and were later discovered by lawmen at a ranch or along a road where a shootout ensued and the robbers ditched much of their loot before being captured. How would one know if the story actually did happen and where the road was once located? Books might tell you the general area that a road or ranch was located, and the internet will most likely say the same thing but nothing to clearly indicate where that trail or ranch was.

Historical archives can add the truth to the story or at least be able to narrow down the tale greatly for the hunter. Usually most archives have a large map collection of the area and may have old military maps and civilian stage routes that went through the region. They generally also have or have access to microfilmed newspapers that could tell the story of the pursuit and capturing of the robbers down to the last detail.

Most archives are located at the larger colleges and libraries of the region. For instance where I work, the West Texas Collection, takes in historically important information from 23 surrounding counties around Tom Green. Larger universities, such as Texas Tech or UT, will usually have a much larger radius for collecting information that they perserve and offer to the public.

So how does one find an historical archives? There's a number of ways to go about finding an archives that could hold the answers to discovering the lost treasures. In contemporary times, every nonfictional publication must have either footnotes or bibliographies to be considered professional. Citations are usually listed at the bottom of a page or at the end of the book, and if information that the author had used was from an historical archives, they would use the complete title of the collection they found the information in, the box number, the file number, the name of the archives, the school or library that the archives is located at, and the city that the school or library is in.

I personally have used our archived material here at the West Texas Collection to find historical sites and also to find historical information on the places I was researching. As I said earlier, historical archives a treasure in themselves and every treasure hunter, researcher, historian, archaeologist, etc. should certainally utilize these places in their hunts and research, the results that can be found are just bedazzling to say the least.   

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Offline GREY RIDER
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« Reply #1 on: April 27, 2011, 02:33:08 pm »
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thanks for sharing

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