Members whose work shaped the archive, and one whose death changed how we run a watch.

Ellen Reiss, 1961–1998

Ellen Reiss was a field member of the Wyoming Valley chapter for nine years. On the night of 24 October 1998 she was part of a two-person watch on a drainage corridor in Monroe County. At some point after 11 p.m. she went into a culvert. She was not supposed to, her partner did not see her do it, and she did not come out.

The coroner recorded drowning. There had been rain upstream earlier in the evening and the pipe took water fast. There is nothing mysterious in the file and we have never suggested otherwise, to her family or to anybody else.

Every absolute in Circular 12-C that has no exception attached to it is there because of this. The culvert rule was a recommendation before 1998. It has not been a recommendation since.

Margaret Hollenbach, 1846–1919

A Bethlehem schoolteacher and the Society's first secretary. Hollenbach established the practice the archive still runs on: copy the witness's own words, keep them, and do not tidy them up because you disagree with what the witness thought they saw. Her indexing notebooks are the basis of all later county cross-referencing.

The 1978 Hollenbach Protocol carries her name. She took no side in the terminology dispute and left no recorded opinion on any of the etymological theories that have since been attributed to her.

Dr. Amos Weller, 1839–1912

Weller called the first formal meeting after the Monocacy incident and kept the Society's correspondence in his Bethlehem consulting rooms. His position was that an uncertain report should be preserved with the ordinary explanations attached to it, rather than either thrown out or promoted past what it could carry. Twenty-three numbered statements in his hand survive. Several are incomplete, and none has been upgraded on the strength of his name.

Isaac Brann, 1842–1903

A surveyor, and the reason several nineteenth-century files can still be laid over a modern map. Brann insisted on scale drawings, property lines, drainage direction, and the marked position of the witness. His field book covering 1878 to 1886 is in restricted storage; the binding is failing and part of it took water at some point before 1940.

Helen C. Varga, 1936–2021

Varga joined in 1964, stayed through the Lexical Schism when a good many people did not, and later chaired the committee that untangled the duplicate case numbering after 1978. She ran the first systematic move of acidic newsprint and carbon-copy witness forms into archival sleeves, largely by hand, over about four years.

Her 1996 memorandum on clean first statements is still handed to new field members. She asked that there be no memorial watch held for her, and there has not been one.

Walter Kremp, 1928–2016

Treasurer, 1989 to 2003. He is on this page because he personally covered the storage rent for eleven months in 1994 and never mentioned it to anyone; it was found in the ledgers after he died.

Additions to this page are made by the Council only, on the recommendation of a chapter. Last addition: 2021.