The Wyoming State Records Advisory Board (SHRAB) is providing funding for five new projects which will make photographs, letters, interviews and videos of Wyoming’s history easily accessible online. That includes two projects in the Powell area.

The Homesteader Museum will digitize 175 cassettes of oral history interviews from the “Strugglers,” homesteading families in the Shoshone Reclamation Project area and other early white settlers throughout the Big Horn Basin. The museum will make the interviews, some including video, available on its website via PastPerfect Online.

Meanwhile, the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation of Powell will digitize audio and video cassette recordings from the Frank Emi collection. Emi led the Fair Play Committee — the largest organized draft resistance movement in any of the Japanese internment camps, which protested military service for men whose civil liberties were being denied by their incarceration in the camps. Also included in the Heart Mountain project will be oral histories and an Honor Roll dedication for the site.

Elsewhere in the Big Horn Basin, the Hot Springs County Historical Museum & Cultural Center in Thermopolis plans to describe and scan 300 photographs of the Grass Creek oil camp, including the ghost town of Ilo, from the 1920s. These photos were donated by local resident, Minnian Richardson, in 22 scrapbooks that include maps, letters and clippings.

Fort Caspar Museum Association in Casper received funding to mount nearly half of their 10,000 collection scans online. These historical photographs and documents depict Casper, Natrona County, and central Wyoming.

Finally, the Wyoming State Archives in Cheyenne will use grant funds to organize and make more easily accessible a large set of documents related to the Big Horn General Stream Adjudication. This legal case, which decided water rights claims submitted by 20,000 tribal and other groups, was settled in 2014. It contains thousands of documents which are still requested by a variety of interested parties, but are not yet efficiently organized or presented online.

These grants are made available through the Wyoming SHRAB by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Many of these groups are also planning to upload their digital files to a nation-wide database called the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). You can search the DPLA (http://dp.la) to find images from Wyoming history, from the Wyoming State Archives and many other Wyoming archives.

For more information, including the grant application, guidelines and a brief presentation about the grant program, visit https://wyoarchives.wyo.gov/index.php/apply-for-a-grant.

The Wyoming SHRAB is administered by the Wyoming State Archives, which is part of the Department of State Parks and Cultural Resources.