Mar 23, 2018 Van Cott Family History in the Digital Library

One of my favorite use cases for digital libraries is with family history. A few days ago, I noticed on Facebook that one of my wife’s distant relatives was visiting the Marriott Library to search for some of their ancestors in Special Collections. This made me wonder what content we might have about those ancestors in our digital library.

I started searching for information about John Van Cott in our digital library and came up with several hits. One of these came from Saga of the Sanpitch, a collection of biographical short stories about Scandinavian immigrants to the Sanpete Valley that we host for the Snow College Library. Volume 30 of this includes a 5 page biographical sketch about John Van Cott.

Snippet from Saga of the Sanpitch Vol 30, page 19

In searching Utah Digital Newspapers, I was able to find hundreds of articles about the Van Cott family and their influence on Utah Territory in the mid to late 1800s, such as this article in the Deseret News in 1859 where John Van Cott spoke at a meeting alongside President Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball.

Deseret News, August 3, 1859

I was also able to find several items about Lucy Van Cott, daughter of John Van Cott and the Dean of Women at the University of Utah from 1907-1931, including this example from the Utonian Yearbooks.

Snippet from page 35 of the 1928 Utonian

Even the mountain near the University of Utah where the Block U is located is named Mount Van Cott after Lucy Van Cott.

Whitewashing the Block U [5]

After finding several resources related to my wife’s family history, I’m excited to dive into our collections more to see what other treasures I can find about our ancestors.