Huzzah for weird dissertations, fully indexed.

Amos Brown as Nanki Poo in The Mikado

This one's worth writing about both because it involved an unconventional research strategy and because the results were so fun.

Thirteen years ago someone showed up to our annual second-cousins Brown family reunion with a photo of my English great-grandfather Amos Brown as a young man in his late 20s or early 30s, dressed in tights and a kimono-type robe, performing the lead role (Nanki-Poo) in The Mikado at a college somewhere in Cache Valley, Utah. We (my branch of the family, and others who'd never seen the photo) were stunned and delighted. We knew he'd been an excellent singer and very talented musically, but didn't know he'd ever donned tights or performed on a non-church stage. I've had a copy of that photo on display ever since and wanted to know more about the performance, but only one branch of the family knew anything about it, and all they knew was this: that great-grandpa Brown, who didn't even make it through grade school, had been asked by a college theater department to take the lead in The Mikado even though he wasn't a college student because he had such a great voice and because he also knew how to play stringed instruments. But nothing else about it was known in the family--no information about what college this happened at, when it happened, whether his performance was well received, or anything else.

So last summer I resolved that I was going to try to find the answer in time for my grandpa's birthday so that I could give him what I found as a birthday present. At first I thought it safe to assume that the college had been the Agricultural College (the biggest of the Cache Valley colleges, which is now Utah State University), but that's a fair distance from where I live, and I couldn't find any evidence from their online archive catalog that they had an easy to search database of old college theater performances. I was willing to make the drive to the USU library, but not if I didn't have reasonable hope of getting a lead within a few hours, and because I didn't even know if USU was the right school, I hesitated to take that route.

The old Logan newspapers had not yet been digitized (even though many other Utah papers had been), so I couldn't just do a newspaper text recognition search.

And the possible time span was about ten years, so searching through Logan newspapers on microfilm hoping to stumble on a story about the performance would have been a fool's errand.

So one day when I was in the LDS Church Archives doing some research for a friend I decided to try some catalog searches on "Logan" and "theater" just to see if anything popped up. The Church Archives contains a lot of material that is non-religious, but connected to Utah culture or history. And what did I find? Someone had written their doctoral dissertation on theater performances in Logan in the early part of the 20th Century (!!?!) and a copy of the dissertation had been donated to the Church Archives! I had it pulled and found that it was fully indexed--so I just looked up "Mikado" in the index, found that there were only two college productions of The Mikado in the ten-year span I was considering, and wrote down the dates of those performances. I was then able to go up to the University of Utah, which is just ten minutes from my house, and search the Logan papers on microfilm to see which of those two productions included great-grandpa Brown. Turns out the Mikado that great-grandpa Brown was involved with was performed in March 1906 and was not connected with the Agricultural College, but rather with the now-defunct Brigham Young College in Logan. And here is some of what I found:

And in the Logan Republican on March 14, 1906 there was a paragraph praising great-grandpa Brown's performance:

"Amos Brown, as 'Nanki Poo,' carried one of the stellar roles and of him there can hardly be too much praise. Brown has a tenor voice of very pleasing quality and he was so thoroughly at his ease that he was able to do his best. He won the best favor of the audience."

My grandpa loved seeing what I found about his father, and we also sent it to his sister, my great-aunt Phyllis, for her 100th birthday. She later took me aside and told me that there was nothing I could have sent her that would have made her happier.

Have I mentioned that I love this stuff? I love this stuff.