Meet our historian, Elaine Young

My name is Elaine Young. I moved to St. George eight years ago and I came up to visit the museum because I thought it was cool. I actually have a picture of me and my family out in front of the museum when I was like 10. Pat Kundic asked me if I was interested in being one of the silver reef ghost knight.

And she assigned me Carrie Walker. And they gave me two sentences about Carrie. She was the first school teacher here. And I thought, well, that’s not enough to talk for ten minutes. So I’m a researcher. I do a lot of genealogy research. And so I thought, I’m going to see what I can find. She was educated back east.

She came here to Salt Lake, took the job because they were paying more money here than she would have ever gotten back east as a school teacher. She married the grocer in town, and then when the miners did their little, , strike, her husband was blackballed, his grocery store, and so they moved north. He died.

She remarried. She never had any children, but she raised five of her nieces and nephews. She had a master’s degree, was an incredibly intelligent and well trained woman, and I just found her fascinating. And so… After that, I kind of got interested in some of the other people that were here, and especially the women, and I did a lot of research on the women first.

And then the board started asking me, Can you do research on this person, or that person, or what about this item that we have in the museum? Can you find out more about the person who did it? And that’s how it got started, and I like to research, so there’s a ton of them now.