To the editor:

I have Judy Sweets, collections manager at the Watkins Community Museum of History, to thank for providing a fascinating historical document that brought an ancestor of mine to life.

When I dropped in at the museum one day several years ago in a random search for family history, Ms. Sweets asked what names I was researching.

She soon disappeared, and re-appeared a few minutes later with an obscure, dusty file she had plucked from a cabinet in some storeroom. The subject of the file was “winemaking,” and it had only one entry. It was a newspaper article published in 1873 and written by my great-great-grandfather, Isadore LaBarriere.

Mr. LaBarriere, a French immigrant, believed Kansas would someday become one of the great winemaking regions of the world.

My ancestor’s prediction has yet to come true, but reading the article he wrote more than 125 years earlier was a thrill for me.

I doubt any professional business manager, no matter how sharp his pencil might be, could have retrieved that file and turned it over to the one person in the world to whom it meant something.

Longtime museum staff members are far too valuable to lose. I hope Ms. Sweets gets to keep her job, and that the Douglas County board of commissioners will realize that a local repository of historical artifacts is well worth supporting with public tax money.

Todd Kepple,

Klamath Falls, Ore.