Time Machine Tuesday: Colorado Educational Directory

If you’re researching teachers, faculty, or other school personnel in Colorado, or are doing your genealogy and have an educator in your family history, you need to check out the Colorado Educational Directory.  Issues for the 1914-15, 1917-18, 1919-20, and 1922-23 school years have been digitized by our library.  They list the names of every teacher and administrator in every Colorado school district, as well as the names of faculty in the state institutions of higher education.  This is an interesting look at early twentieth century education in Colorado, and can be useful for gleaning information on school/district size, male-female teacher ratios, courses of study that were emphasized, and more.

You can check out later issues, from the 1950s through the 1980s, in hard copy form.  By this time, Colorado’s population had grown enough that it was no longer feasible to list every teacher or faculty member, but they do list the administrators.  Issues after 1990 became known as the Colorado Education and Library Directory and also include listings of library personnel as well as all staff of the Department of Education.  Listings of faculty members for state universities can be found by searching the terms “personnel roster” and “staffing pattern” in our library’s online catalog.