toledoblade.com --

BOWLING GREEN - If shows like Antiques Roadshow haven't convinced people of the value of their old stuff, the Center for Archival Collections at Bowling Green State University is willing to give it a try.

The regional history archive is always looking to acquire the kinds of records and photographs that often get pitched when people clean out their attics or a loved one dies.

"We're trying to get to people before those things hit the burn barrel," said Stephen Charter, reference archivist at the center.

Unlike some collectors, though, the center does not require donors to give them original documents if they do not wish. Mr. Charter said the staff will happily photocopy records that they believe could

be of importance to researchers now or in the future.

Since 1970, when the Center for Archival Collections was created to collect and preserve research materials related to Ohio history, the center has been carefully storing and cataloguing personal diaries, photographs, scrapbooks, letters written home during wartime, old newspapers, and boxes upon boxes of records from local government, businesses, and organizations.

A tour through the materials - which fill the fifth and sixth floors of Jerome Library at Bowling Green State University - reveals a variety of records as obscure as "Unpaid subscription accounts, Tiffin Advertiser Tribune, 1938-1956," to boxes of old records from the former Lonz Winery on Middle Bass Island.

And just who comes to look at these unusual treasures? Mr. Charter said you'd be surprised.

A reporter from Spy Magazine showed up one day to sift through the center's collection of letters and other papers belonging to former U.S. Rep. Thomas "Lud" Ashley, a friend of former President George H.W. Bush. The reporter was looking for evidence of a rumored affair the elder Mr. Bush purportedly had. (The reporter found none, Mr. Charter said.)

Lawyers who represented people injured in the 2000 collapse of the concrete patio at Lonz Winery came to the center to review documents pertaining to the old building's construction.

About half of the people who use the center are family historians tracking their genealogy, Mr. Charter said, but the center is used by researchers as young as elementary school students.

Pat Rife, a teacher at St. Boniface School in Oak Harbor, brought a small group of third, fourth, and fifth graders to the Jerome Library last month and ended up looking up Oak Harbor history.

"The kids really were astounded at the stacks and stacks of old books and maps," she said. "They never realized that anyone kept all these old books, and I don't think they had ever thought how important it was to keep them."

The Center for Archival Collections is a close and natural resource for BGSU professors like Ed Danziger, who has been sending his history students there for research projects for years.

"They get the chance to touch and feel these documents and see how rich they can be," Dr. Danziger said.

While not everyone may think grandma's diary or a soldier's letters home from Vietnam would be valuable, Dr. Danziger said local viewpoints on historic events and social issues are vital to understanding history.

"They have the papers of Lud Ashley and they have the papers of Delbert Latta, and that gives us one perspective, but the more perspectives the better," he said. "... There's no such thing as materials too humble or too pedestrian."

Contact Jennifer Feehan at: jfeehan@theblade.com or 419-353-5972.

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