Digging Up Archives’ Treasures

Poor James T. Wallace. With that lame left leg of his, it must have been a chore to travel from his Fullerton farm to the Orange County registrar’s office in Santa Ana on that summer day in late June 1900.

But is was an election year, and the young man didn’t want to miss out on his chance to weigh in on President McKinley’s reelection bid. So, with Wallace standing before him, a clerk opened the hulking, leather-bound “Great Register of Voters,” dipped a pen in ink and started to enter Wallace’s vitals.

In perfect penmanship, he took note of the young man’s handicap and 6-foot frame, lest there be any confusion come election day.

If you have any such roots in the county, odds are they have wended their way into the thousands of books and boxes on the shelves at the Orange County archive.

“Some people like the analogy of solving a mystery, but I prefer the image of a jigsaw puzzle,” said county archivist Phil Brigandi. “As you get more pieces, you can start to get a picture of what was going on and where the holes are.”

First opened in 1983, the archive was closed in June 1995 during the dark days of the county’s bankruptcy. Dust collected on its shelves until last spring, when newly elected county Clerk-Recorder Tom Daly pushed for its revival. Brigandi, a local historian who grew up in Orange, was hired and set to work reassembling the county’s history.

To walk into the archive -- on the first floor of the old county courthouse in Santa Ana -- is to walk into the past. With the enthusiasm of a kid on Christmas morning, Brigandi points out the 650 volumes of handwritten property deeds, minutes from the county’s first Board of Supervisors meeting in 1889 and every subsequent one until 1965, mining claim notices, environmental impact reports, maps, photographs, road plans, land assessments, voter rolls.

To some, the material might be a bore, but to Brigandi they are portals to lives of the past. Richard Nixon wrote that he grew up in a house that his father built. Brigandi can show you the deed to the Yorba Linda property Nixon’s father filed in 1913 after paying the last installment. Southern California Edison is a monolithic company, but Brigandi can tell you that at 59 minutes and 30 seconds past 10 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1917, a representative of the company paid $1 to register the brand used to mark its beasts of burden.

Two basic types of people visit Brigandi. The “practical folk,” as he calls them, come to do research for the history books they’re writing or to review environmental impact reports on certain areas.

Their requests run from the mundane to the unusual. One man called recently in search of information on defunct missile silos in the county (there’s one in Stanton).

Brigandi handles such requests with professionalism, but it is the second type of visitor who clearly pleases him more: the regular Joes or Janes trying to uncover a piece of their past.

Buried in the millions of pages of the seemingly pedestrian material are vignettes such as the lame-legged Wallace’s -- and Brigandi loves to dig.

With wide smiles, the archivist and his assistant, Chris Jepsen, interrupt each other as they tell of a recent visit from an Alaskan in search of clues about her grandparents. The woman knew only that the two had reportedly married in the county while passing through on their travels north. Brigandi and Jepsen pulled out marriage indexes from the 1920s and eventually found the couple’s names.

“She said she wished she could know where they actually got married. So, I told her to walk about 15 feet in that direction,” Jepsen said, pointing down the hallway. “That’s where Judge Morrison would have married them: in the old Santa Ana Justice Court.”

But the archive, Brigandi insists, is hardly a static depository for things past.

With the county’s various departments and agencies producing an endless stream of material, one of Brigandi’s main responsibilities is deciding what to preserve.

When unsure, he asks himself whether he would want the same document from 50 years earlier. If the answer is yes, he stores it for the time someone comes looking 50 years from now.

The task, Brigandi believes, is a unique one in a county where hyper-development has become the norm and neighborhoods seemingly crop up overnight, but without the glue of identity to hold them together.

Far from living in the county’s past, Brigandi is concerned with its future.

“What gives a place identity?” he wonders. “Is it possible to give the younger communities [in Orange County] an identity? When the time comes for people to look over their shoulder and look back at their history, I hope this will be a good place to begin.”