Dedicated historian Janet Lecompte began digging up dead people's pasts when she was 18 years old. And she's never ceased.

Janet with friends Ruby Valentine and Lois Blackburn
 

Born in Philadelphia in 1923, then raised in Colorado, Janet was home from her first year of college the summer her mother, Dorothy Price Shaw, enlisted her aid in turning raw notes on Colorado settlers into historically correct accounts for museum archives.

“I’d been raised in Denver, but my parents had just moved to Colorado Springs,” Janet says. “I had no friends there, and didn’t even try to make any. Instead, I spent the summer helping my mother with all these notebooks that needed to be turned into readable history.”

It all started with Janet’s grandmother, Maude McFerran Price. An original citizen of the new community of Colorado Springs in the 1870s, she had the foresight to understand that history was happening every day. “She went around to all the people there in those early days and said, ‘give me a memento, give me something, because I want to start a museum,’” Janet relates. “So the people in Colorado Springs gave her things like stoves and buggies.” That first collection, along with constant additions, is housed in Colorado Springs’ old city hall building. “It’s right in the middle of Colorado Springs,” Janet says. “A beautiful old building on a square city block, the Pioneers’ Museum.”

Besides household mementos, Mrs. Price collected 14 notebooks of early residents’ reminiscences from F.W. Cragin, a geology professor at Colorado College in the 1900s. “He went around the area and talked to people about their lives,” Janet recalls. “He wanted to know how people got to where they were and what they did there.”

Janet’s mother inherited the raw notes. Janet took over the immense task of turning the notes into articles. And when Janet’s mother died in 1950, there were still notes to be transcribed. “I, of course, felt obliged to see that it all got out,” Janet says. And that’s how Janet, an English major who had studiously avoided taking history courses because she considered them boring, ended up becoming a historian.

The archives at last completed, Janet continued to undertake projects with a focus on New Mexico history. “Somebody would call up and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got some stuff on my family. Would you like to look at it?’” Janet declares, “My first mistake was always saying ‘yes.’” But then the sleuth in her would take over, and she would begin again the methodical search for truth.

“I look everyplace I can,” she says. “If it’s a village or maybe Santa Fe, I go there and look around. Then I go to the county clerk, say I want the records of land transfer. I go to the library to see if there’s anything like a diary. And so on.”

Facts in hand, Janet begins to reconstruct lives long past. Her finished works are footnoted because she values documentation and authenticity.

But beyond dry facts, Janet attempts to include authentic details that bring those long-dead subjects to life. “Everyone has secrets,” she says. “I always want to see how people react, their feelings, their hopes and fears.”

Reactions and responses aren’t always recorded. “I don’t always find all the facts I want,” she says. “So I jump — I jump into what I think they were doing, into what I think their motivations were based on what I know of place and time. But because I want to be correct, I don’t say ‘this is the way it was,’ I say ‘probably,’ ‘most likely.’”

“My number-one focus,” she continues, “is to make history readable. Many historians are so intent on being correct that their writings are just facts. I’m very authentic, too. But I try to make history interesting.”

Janet’s diligent research and writing efforts have led to a wealth of published articles and books. Among them is the well-received book, “Pueblo, Hardscrabble, Greenhorn,” a narrative of early life in these three primitive Colorado communities.

For this book she was awarded both the 1978 Westerners’ International Award for best non-fiction book, and the 1978 Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award for best non-fiction book.

She also contributed a collection of 25 biographical sketches, first published as articles, to the book, “French Fur Traders and Voyageurs in the American West.”

“There were about four to one Frenchmen to American fur traders,” Janet relates. “They were the main part of the fur trading business in the West.”

Many more articles and books cover the Colorado-New Mexico area from 1590 to today. Most focus on the early 19th century.

Janet wasn’t even looking for a story the day a Colorado College librarian offered her an old diary. “The woman said, ‘it’s probably dull as paint, but you might find something in it,’” Janet recalls. “And did I ever!”

The diary recorded the days of a middle-aged, divorced Denver cleaning woman in 1893. “I started to read, and I could feel my hair just standing up off my scalp,” Janet marvels. “Here was this woman — she was so poor. She had this horrible life. She was all feelings, and she wrote down exactly how she felt every day.”

Janet edited the diary, which was published under the title: “Emily: The Diary of a Hard-Worked Woman.”

“After this book was published, people who hadn’t even known Emily existed read the book, discovered that she was of their family and wrote me,” Janet recounts. “One of them lived in Colorado Springs all this time. So I went there to have dinner. She had all her relatives come, about 14 people.” Janet beams at the memory. “We had the best time talking about Emily.”

For someone who has spent so many years stirring the ashes of the long dead, Janet has an amazing zest for life. She’s quick to laughter, quick to wit, and very, very quick to debate the discrepancies of history.

She moved to Moscow in the 1980s to be near friends. “And I’ve loved it here,” she says, “everything but the winter climate. It wouldn’t be hard to go back to the sunny winter days of Colorado. But it would be hard to leave here.”

She entertains often in her comfortable home with a lovely view of the foothills even on gray winter days. Three devoted poodles, Minnie, Pooey, and Coalie, provide constant company. Five grown and scattered children call and visit. And, of course, there are her books, shelves and shelves of wonderful books.

“I have books that belonged to my great grandfather, to my grandmother, and to my mother,” she says. “I am an only child, and my mother was an only child. So I became the repository for all these books.”

“There are very few days in my whole adult life that I haven’t done some writing,” she says. “It becomes a habit.” But, being a habitual friend to many in Moscow, Janet has recently decided to trade in her writing habit for daily doses of good friends morning, noon and night. “I love Moscow and the type of people it attracts. As a youngster, I chose writing over friends. Now, after 60-plus years of daily writing, it’s time for friends.”