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Tales from Kansas City

Remember the days of gathering memories through photographs, newspaper clippings, greeting cards, and autograph albums?  What happens to those keepsakes when we are long gone?  Fortunately for me, my great-grandmother's first cousin Helen Burwell Gale (1910-1994) saved her family treasures and donated them to the University of Missouri Library at Kansas City.

For a description of the holdings at the University*, go to:


I will be posting stories from the Burwell/Tate Family Papers.

Helen was a dancer in the 1920s and 1930s in Kansas City.  Photographs of Helen by Baron Siroon Missakian are online as part of the Baron Missakian Collection at the University of Missouri Library Systems Digital Library.  Go to: Photographs of Helen Burwell.
*The personal papers are now part of the Kansas City Manuscript Collections at the State Historical Society of Missouri, located at 800 East 51st Street, 306 Miller Nichols Library UMKC, Kansas City, MO 64110. These links were updated on 20 February 2023.
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Location: Kansas City, Missouri, USA

Comments

  1. JaniceAugust 24, 2017 at 3:20 PM

    Michele, I was the (then-young) archivist who processed the Helen Tate Burwell collection many years ago. I also had the opportunity to interview her in the late 1980s. I drove by the original family mansion, which, sadly, had been replaced by a duplex around the 1950s. Glad to see that the Burwell history is still being researched.

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    Replies
    1. Michele Paplanus ~ The Family History BloggerAugust 26, 2017 at 6:25 PM

      Hi Janice, thank you for saving the family collection. Helen was my great-grandmother Alice Burwell Bryant's first cousin. My grandmother did not know anything about her Burwell relations except Alice's father's name was William Burwell. I am sure Alice knew, she would travel back to Illinois and all over to visit family and friends. When I started researching my family I was able to share it with my grandmother who passed away in 2014 at age 94.

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