Richardson Family Papers: An Introduction

In the early 1980s, Madge Richardson Walsh, as the self-nominated family historian, started pulling together family stories and letters with an eye to publishing them for family members. Two volumes of the Richardson-Smith-Street Family Papers were self-published by Madge. In the days before computers and internet, Volume I (1983) entailed photocopying photos and typesetting on an electric typewriter; Volume II (1991) was assembled using an early version of Microsoft Works. The first volume was embellished with poor quality photocopies; the second with photographic prints hand-pasted onto the correct pages, and hand bound, much to the chagrin of her family, who lived for months with a dining room transformed into an assembly line of signatures (groups of pages sewn together) and hardboard being covered with matching quaint cotton print (brown on white for Volume I, white on brown for Volume II), each completed book being pressed by bricks on a sheet of plywood as they dried. Each volume was hand-numbered; at least 31 copies of each were made and distributed to family members. 

With these small successes, and empowered with increasingly powerful computers and software, she outlined a total of five volumes: Volume III was to be her father Russell's memoirs and wartime letters, as well as a charming story written by Florence Grinsted Richardson; Volume IV was to be dedicated to George Owen Richardson's Autobiography and a Memoir by David Fay Richardson. The pièce de résistance was to be Volume V: Recollections of My Life Work, a transcription of the Journal George Warren Richardson's (GWR), the Richardson family patriarch, which spanned a key part of this country's history.

By the time of Madge's death in 2015, the various pieces of these and other writings were scattered throughout her disorganized home: the Alzheimer's that ravaged her brain also stole her organizational ability. Some of the pieces were found in their entirety on one floppy diskette (Volume II), others printed out at 50% in several copies (Owen's journal transcription abruptly ends mid-sentence), and even more were just snippets on disk in outdated software formats or individual hard copy pages. Many family artifacts were passed on to her nephew, who has published the story of GWR's Journal as The Abolitionist's Journal; Most of the cartons of letters that she refers to are now lost to time, but the photographs and other items are or will be professionally digitized, and the most historically significant will be housed in a world-class library.

In 2000, she writes about her progress on the project in a letter to her nephew James Richardson:

As you know, I’ve been working up the family tree, aiming toward printing GWR’s autobiography for the family. I practiced by starting with my father’s generation—but after the first two little volumes, I got bogged down, because when I started on Dad’s memoirs, I discovered he had saved every family letter he had ever received, for over 60 years—cartons of them. Mother kept the letters he wrote to her, and in return she had written to him every day when he was on the USS Gridley.

It was so overwhelming, I decided to skip to their parents’ generation, as both David Fay Richardson and George Owen Richardson had written memoirs, and the younger two boys and Emma are mentioned in them. David Fay unfortunately wrote only a few chapters, with tantalizing remarks about what he was going to write about, but never did. Still, with the letters and a bit of research in the county deed records in Roseburg, Ore., there is enough, and Ruth and Florence both already had told quite a bit about him.

Uncle Owen (as he was usually referred to) wrote a whole book. I’ve transcribed it all, and am annotating where it seems to need it. Since he was very close to his father, and was associated with him particularly during their ministry in Texas, there are passages you may find very illuminating. There is much to read between the lines. It is also intriguing to read about the same incidents as told by GWR and then by Owen.

What has held me up on this book has been some of the annotating, as well as the format—this volume will not be hand-bound! that’s for sure, and I’ve been trying to learn to use a scanner so I can incorporate photos with the text...

As a way to preserve these stories, I offer up the pieces of this project that I have or can reconstruct with the aid of fellow family historians, and will add pieces as they come. 

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