Letitia Carson · Inventory
In the Library’s files
The creator's working folders, which the Library holds and does not publish.
Everything else in this series is on the creator’s own public site, and the Library mirrors and indexes it. What is described on this page is different: the working folders he uploaded to the Library, which he has not published. They are described so that a researcher knows what exists and can ask; they are not put online.
What is in them
Its own arrangement tells you the shape of the story. There is a biography file with seventeen subfolders arranged as chapters — Kentucky, Ireland, Missouri, the Oregon Trail, Soap Creek, the Carson estate, Carson v. Smith, Cow Creek, Letitia Creek, the Umatilla allotments — plus a chronology from 1845 to 1888, two family lines traced from 1775 to 1922, maps and references. Beside it sit an earlier 2012 working file, descendant research with the Lavadour family, newspaper articles sorted into four period runs from 1853 to 1922, commissioned artwork, exhibit material, books for younger readers, project administration, and recent drafts including a K–12 teaching file.
The count
Counted in the creator’s uploaded folders, 2026-09-04. 1,771 files , 3.9 GB.
| Folder | Files | Size | What is in it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Letitia_Carson-2012 | 712 | 1.9 GB | Bob's earliest full snapshot of the Carson research project: probate and court-case scans, GLO/USGS map scans, a legacy 17-chapter biography draft, and older transcripts. Superseded by the 2022 and 2024 copies below. |
| Presentations | 27 | 933 MB | Video and slide-deck recordings of talks Bob has given about Letitia Carson (conferences, historical societies). Not on the public website. |
| Biography | 257 | 643 MB | The full, unpublished 17-chapter book-length Letitia Carson biography manuscript, with three appendices (chronology, Carson family, Lavadour family). This is Bob's working manuscript, not yet published anywhere. |
| 2024_Letitia | 380 | 148 MB | Bob's most recent (2024) snapshot of the Carson project. Its Documentation, Library, Maps, Illustrations, and Photographs branches use the same folder names and general content as what is live on orww.org today, though we did not verify every file matches one-for-one (see report). |
| Letitia_Carson-2022 | 203 | 91.1 MB | A 2022 snapshot of the same Documentation/Library/Maps/Illustrations/Photographs research material, now superseded by the 2024 snapshot above. Kept as a backup copy, not itself the live site. |
| Articles | 40 | 60.1 MB | Draft magazine and journal articles about Letitia Carson. |
| Maps | 14 | 45.9 MB | Douglas County surveyor cadastral map scans (saved from a county map website) plus a few draft cover/map PDFs titled "Letitia Carson". Not the same as the Maps folders nested inside the project snapshots below. |
| Illustrations | 9 | 32.8 MB | A mixed folder of source images: family/exhibit photos, a historical slave-register page naming a "Letitia" (used as biographical source research, not a living person), and a few personal-looking snapshots (IMG_*.jpeg) whose subject we could not identify. Worth a look before anything from here is used publicly. |
| Exhibit | 7 | 17.5 MB | A handful of large photographic exhibit images. |
| (root) | 12 | 12.3 MB | Loose files sitting at the very top of the Drive folder: a word-count spreadsheet, a Ford Family Foundation article PDF, thesis drafts, and draft manuscript files. |
| Childrens_Books | 7 | 4.0 MB | Draft materials for a children's book about Letitia Carson, plus unrelated stamp-collecting reference images that appear to have been saved into the same folder by mistake. |
| Letitia-Kentucky | 1 | 263 KB | A single historical document (an 1800s Kentucky will listing enslaved people) used as source research. |
| 2025_K-12 | 3 | 94.5 KB | Draft chapters for a middle-grade nonfiction book about Letitia Carson aimed at a school audience. |
Counted but not described: Billings (13 files — Bob's own invoices, billing records, and a signed funding agreement with a grant funder; financial paperwork, not history content.); Letitia-Lavadours (35 files — Genealogy research and family-history correspondence about the Lavadour family, who descend from Letitia Carson and may include living relatives.); Letitia_Carson-2012/Lavadours (8 files — Older-snapshot copy of the same Lavadour descendant-family genealogy research.); Letitia_Carson-2012/Genealogies (16 files — Older-snapshot genealogy charts and family-tree research, potentially naming living descendants.); Letitia_Carson-2022/Genealogies (13 files — Mid-snapshot copy of the same genealogy charts and family-tree research.); Letitia_Carson-2022/Correspondence (11 files — Personal correspondence bundled with the 2022 snapshot, largely duplicating the Library/Correspondence folder in the 2024 snapshot; kept out of the public count as a precaution since some items concern the Lavadour family.); Letitia_Carson-2022/Letitia-Zybach-Meranda_2014_DRAFT/Carson_Genealogy (3 files — Draft genealogy chart material for the unpublished 2014 co-authored manuscript.).
What is left out of the description
- Financial and billing records in the project folders. Described as a category, never itemised, never published.
- Personal information about living descendants. The genealogy files run to people alive now; the Library describes the files as files and publishes nothing from them.
- Commissioned illustrations and the books for younger readers, which are commercial work belonging to the artists and authors who made them.
Known gaps and cautions
- Several drafts of the biography exist across folders dated from 2012 to 2025. Which one is the text has not been established.
- The chapter folders and the site’s public outline are not identical, and the Library has not reconciled them.
- Some material appears both here and on his public site in a different arrangement — the Jack’s house photographs, for instance, are filed twice on the site itself.
Asking for something
A researcher who needs a file described on this page should write, saying what they need and why. The Library will pass the request to the creator; it is his material and his decision. How to ask.
Provenance
- Creator
- Dr. Bob Zybach; Oregon Websites and Watershed Project, Inc.
- Received
- Uploaded by the creator
- His public site
- orww.org/History/Letitia_Carson/
- In this collection
- Described at inventory level; nothing from these folders is published
- Excluded
- Billing and financial records; personal information about living descendants; commissioned artwork and children’s books
