Keeper of history gets A's in our book

When Carol Harbison-Samuelson was a student at Medford Senior High School, she failed a history test.

Actually, failed is being euphemistic. She bombed. Big time.

"I got a big fat 'F,' " she says before breaking up into her well-known contagious laughter.

History buffs who know the research library manager and photo archivist at the Southern Oregon Historical Society can't help but chuckle. We know her as one of the brightest, most knowledgeable and engaging people in the region when it comes to local history.

She has been there to cheerfully guide us through one historical maze after another. Like her laughter, her energetic enthusiasm for all things historical is infectious. You couldn't help but walk away from one of her history lessons filled with inspiration.

Sadly, Friday was her last day at SOHS. After 21 years with the society, she is taking a break.

"With any good artifact, you got to give it a rest, and I need a little rest," she says. "I hate to go, but it's time."

But she consented to sitting down for a chat about why history and local historical societies, many of which are in dire need of financial and volunteer help, are important.

"We all are the keepers of the history," she explains. "We have the responsibility to make sure it is not lost. And if you don't take care of it, it will be lost."

Born Carol Hjorten on June 4, 1948, in Astoria, she moved with her family as a little girl to Medford, where she graduated from high school in 1966, the one bad history score notwithstanding.

History is in her genes. Not only was she born in the Pacific Northwest's most historical town, but so were her parents.

"My (maternal) grandfather Otto Owen helped found the Clatsop County Historical Society," she says. "My mother didn't understand the joy I got from history but my father loved history. He was first generation native Oregonian. His father got off the ship from Norway in 1903."

And there was her grandfather, Owen, a history buff's buff.

"When we moved down here, my grandfather took me out to the Jacksonville Museum to meet the Hanley 'girls,' " she says. "That's what he called them."

She was referring to the pioneering Hanley family which would eventually donate the historic family farm to SOHS. By then, the Hanley sisters were elderly folks with gray locks. While poring over material left at the Hanley house, the SOHS staff found a note from Otto Owen to then aging Mary Hanley about Oregon's centennial celebration in 1959.

"Grandpa died when I was 13 but I've always thought he would be tickled pink that I am now the gray-haired old lady at the place," Carol observes. "I had such fond memories of going out to the museum with grandpa. I always wanted to be a volunteer at the Jacksonville Museum."

She volunteered a little over two decades ago, participating in its first docent-training program.

"That was it — I was hooked," she says. "I read everything I could get my hands on about local history."

She became the sleuth who could connect the historical dots, be it a name to a face on a faded photograph or a date to an event lost in time.

"You can take it from wherever you want to take it from, but I believe these people who were before us want their stories known," she says. "After 21 years of doing this, I know there is some force out there. And, by golly, it has been such a joy to help tell their stories. But when a story is lost forever, that just hurts my soul."

Just as it warms her soul when she can connect the dots to a family's story. She recalls a man once contacted the SOHS office from New Jersey, looking for distant relatives who had come west to Oregon.

"He had an uncle, a priest, who had come out here," she says. "The man had a postcard dated around 1917 his uncle had sent his family."

With that, she eventually tracked down a family member, thus continuing that family's story down through history.

"If you don't have historical societies that are keeping that history alive — oral history, newspaper articles, photographs — then it can die and be lost forever," she says. "Guarding the books that tell the stories, the oral histories, the three-dimensional artifacts, is so very important."

While lauding those who are volunteering at local historical societies, she urges the rest of us to get off our duffs to support those societies.

"But if you don't have a deep passion for history, you shouldn't be working at an historical society," she stresses. "Without that passion, you can't find the rest of the story."

It matters not a whit to her that your family has deep roots in the region or that you just fell off the potato truck: She will tell you we all have a stake in local history.

"History is five minutes ago," she says. "We are all making history. It tells us who we are. We will always need people who are keepers of that history."

People like Carol Harbison Samuelson, one who aced history's ultimate test.