January Volunteer Spotlight:
Karen Taylor
January 2024
Meet Karen! Karen has been a volunteer at Turtle Bay for 20 years, most of that time working for our curator Julia Cronin for whom she has immense respect and admiration. Karen loves working with Julias team! We sat down with Karen and asked her all about her 20 years of experience here at the pond!
“Occasionally I get to help with setup or teardown of an exhibit which I enjoy. I do a variety of tasks, often involving scanning and photographing items in our collections with occasional research. There is a binder out in the museum, Famous Families, with short bios about many pioneer families in Shasta County, for which I have done all the writeups and occasionally add new ones when I have time. One of the most interesting was discovering the Carter family and that Jesse Carter was a California Supreme Court Judge! For Famous Families I also get to pursue my love of genealogy when working on background for a family. Sometimes I’m even able to find living descendants to help with accuracy on their family. It is fascinating to learn more about the history of our area, never knowing what interesting facts will come to light. “
Karen has dedicated hours of time and passion into creating our rotating exhibit “Spotlight on Northstate History.” She loves to see guests interacting and reading with the Spotlights she has created!
“The Spotlight on Northstate History, involves research, writing and picking the items for the accompanying display case. This exhibit changes every few months to a new topic and the display case highlights items from our collections pertaining to the subject. Topics can be about a local family, historic businesses, the railroad, mining, anything of local historical interest. We have many rare and interesting objects in our collections and I love researching and discovering more about them. One of my favorites was Robbers, Murders and Thieves about all the bad boys in our area and their dastardly deeds. I love it if I’m at the museum and see someone reading one of the Spotlights. We are currently working on an extensive piece about the now gone Downtown Mall which it turns out was unique in the country for covering an actual street and existing buildings. I love Turtle Bay and supporting them by volunteering my time and energy! It is a great way to contribute to our community and support an outstanding museum.”
Thank you Karen, because of community members like you, we can continue to let the Turtle bay Museum flourish!