President's Message
June 2003
Tesoro. The word is Spanish for "treasure," and the real treasure that's hidden inside the new Tesoro Del Valle project at the mouth of San Francisquito Canyon in Saugus are the old Harry Carey Ranch buildings.
They're wonderful structures with a whole lot of history. Silent film star Harry Carey settled on the property in 1916 and used it both as a film location and as his home. Capitalizing on the popularity of the "wild and woolly West," Carey turned the ranch into a tourist attraction complete with a trading post and Navajo performers.
Then came March 1928 and the St. Francis Dam failure. The trading post was washed away but Carey's original wood-frame home was spared — only to be lost to fire four years later. Carey rebuilt, this time in Spanish adobe style, and the large home still stands.
In the 1950s the Clougherty family, producers of the Farmer John line of meat products, purchased the ranch, and in the 1990s they formed a limited liability company, Montalvo Properties, to transform the 1,200-plus acres into a 1,791-unit residential community.
Way back in 1993 the late Jerry Reynolds started discussing preservation plans with the property owners. The Society entered negotiations and, in 1999, signed an agreement calling for Society ownership of the main ranch house and an adjacent cabin, bunkhouse and out-buildings, with funding for museum staffing and operations to come from the developer and future homeowners. In 2001 and 2002, as the developer prepared to start construction, we met several times to execute the final documents.
They say the devil's in the details, and the Society and developer hadn't quite come to terms by the time the first model homes opened this spring. However, the Society board remained committed to the 1999 agreement and to its goal of preserving and operating the site, so an influential Society member stepped in to resolve the matter — County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich.
Thanks to Mr. Antonovich's dedication to preserving the historic buildings, a new round of negotiations is underway among the Society, the developer and the county, with the expectation of finalizing the plans within the month.
That's where things stand. Details include the formation of a landscape and lighting district to pay for grounds maintenance, and a separate arrangement, now under discussion, to finance the Society's operation of the museum. Stay tuned.
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Among its other virtues the Harry Carey house will give us a good venue for showcasing the Santa Clarita Valley's film history, which dates all the way to the birth of Hollywood cinema. Today our eight buildings and Gene Autry's locomotive at Heritage Junction Historic Park provide modern-day producers with a picturesque backdrop for Western-themed features, episodes and commercials, and the Society is ratcheting up its efforts to make them available for that purpose.
Board members Cathy Martin and Carol Rock recently revamped the Society's filming policies, and Cathy worked with Jason Crawford, the City of Santa Clarita's film office chief, to publicize the Society's assets through the city's new "Film Santa Clarita" program. Photographs and descriptions of the Society's offerings appear online at filmsantaclarita.com, and new information tailored for location managers has been added to the Society's own Web site at scvhs.org.
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The Saugus Train Station doubled as a classroom in May when more than 50 local elementary school teachers participated in an in-service workshop organized by Society volunteer Patti Rasmussen and led by Joan Feldner of the Saugus Union School District and Karen Haas from Rosedell Elementary School.
SCV history is a component of the third-grade curriculum throughout the valley, and the participants in this inter-district workshop were greeted with flip-charts describing, and large maps showing, local points of historic interest. Materials were funded through a community services grant from the City of Santa Clarita. Teachers said they found the information useful and planned to incorporate it into classroom assignments.
— Leon Worden, President
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Genealogy Group News
June 2003
The Genealogy Group met on May 1. We finished up the video on "Beginning Legacy Family Tree" and learned how powerful the program was. We expressed that the program had so many features that a beginner could feel intimidated to try to see the video without actually having the program on their computer. A couple of the people who said they had purchased the program and installed on their computer finally realized what Geoffrey Rasmussen, who was doing the demonstrations, was talking about.
Helen Blancher talked to the group about the Personal Ancestral Program 5.0. She said she had installed the program on her machine and that the instructions claimed that PAF 5.0 would automatically translate your Personal Ancestral Program family data from version 4.0 to 5.0, once you brought up the data file. Helen told the group that the data files did not transfer properly, and that she had to delete the data files and use a GEDCOM* of the file to get the program to accept the data files. By using the GEDCOM file, the data appeared to be intact. Helen recommended that anyone deciding to use Personal Ancestral Program 5.0, use a GEDCOM file instead of trying to use the translation file. Helen also recommended that everyone automatically make a GEDCOM file of all their family data, just in case of any computer failure, as some of the so-called backups do not always work properly. John Watson said he had installed PAF 5.0 and took it off and went back to version 4.0 because he had trouble with the 5.0 version.
Carol Beeding brought some books on early Iowa marriages and asked if anyone doing research in Iowa was interested in looking at the books.
The group decided not to meet in June due to the many school graduations and vacations during the month. We will meet again on Sept. 4 at 7 p.m. at the Saugus Train Station. Our subject will be a "Show and Tell from our Summer Vacation" with everyone participating.
* A GEDCOM file is a standard file format for exchanging information between genealogy programs. The acronym GEDCOM stands for GEnealogy Data COMmunications. How a GEDCOM file works is unique to genealogy programs. All genealogy programs are a data base that assigns a number to each individual and a number to each marriage, and when you create this GEDCOM, it puts them in a numerical sequence so that the individual data and the marriages can be put back in the proper order into the program when asked to so by the many different genealogy programs that people use. All genealogy programs have the capability of making a GEDCOM file within their programs.
— Helen Blancher
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